Inspired by
the need to streamline group-forming in college classes, where the majority of students find it difficult to find a common time to collaborate.
What groupEDU does
Rather than being placed randomly or choosing to team up with those closest to their seats, students will upload their availability to groupEDU, which will automate the team-forming process. groupEDU will place students in groups according to their schedules' compatibility. Student A, who is too busy on Mondays, will never be paired with Student B who is most free on Mondays. Rather than wasting time trying to figure out a time that will work best with everyone, students are placed in a team based on a common time.
How we built it
On the front-end, we used the classic HTML/CSS combination to create an aesthetically appealing but straightforward form. The form's data is submitted to an ASP, then exported as a .cvs file. Using Python as our back-end language, we parse through this .cvs file and implement Ford-Fulkerson.
Challenges we ran into
Implementing the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm in Python was definitely a monster of a challenge. Creating the graphs was very difficult, because we all had a pretty introductory knowledge of Python. Being efficient was definitely another big struggle. At one point, we had five nested for-loops that also included several if-else branches. It was hilarious, then not, then extremely sad. Still, we had a good laugh, pulled through, worked on our front-end interface, and got our code to a level we could all be proud of as beginner back-end developers.
What we've learned
The past 36 hours have definitely pushed us as programmers. This being the first Hackathon everyone in this team has participated in, we weren't sure what to even expect, let alone what to code. It took us the majority of the first day (Friday) to even come up with the idea (after messaging our friends and asking them for an app they wish they had), and the majority of the second day to come up with the algorithm to optimize our code. All of Saturday was a mad and stressful rush to get our code up and running.
What's next for groupEDU
We hope to continue developing groupEDU to be a fully functional web application. The front-end and interface of groupEDU is already solidified. We just have to hone our skills more as Python back-end developers, so we can make our plans and potentials a reality. Eventually, we want to implement groupEDU so it can handle a class of over 500 students efficiently. We would also like to implement additional features/parameters like having an option to choose the "minimum period of common time" to be more than an hour.
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