uTIPS | Devpost

Inspiration

As college students, we encounter different types of classes, from classes we enjoyed learning the most to the classes we consider "easy-As." However, everyone must have at least encountered a class they consider "hard". Their reasonings could be, and are not limited to:

Not being able to understand it
The professor goes a bit too fast
Excessive homework
Not sure how to prepare for the course

This could result in students not liking the class at all, not doing well, losing motivation, or even dropping out of the class. So, how do we come up with a way to combat this issue? We can solve this by using uTIPS. This revolutionary software would help students find the correct resources they need to ace a class. With the assistance from alumni and students who have already taken the course, current students can get advice from them, such as asking about the structure of the classes or the teaching method of a professor.

What it does

When the student gets on the application, they will be able to get access to the general resources listed under the Resource page, but if they want to access more advanced features, they would need to sign in. This would allow them to find resources and tips that are specific to the course desired. What are these resources and tips? When we refer to tips, we allow students to put up posts regarding their issues with a course and have informative feedback from plenty of students who took the course already. As for resources, the former students will post helpful links or documents that will help current students with the class. A former student could even sell an old textbook to a current student!

Using this application, we hope that current students will start to enjoy learning about this class. We also hope that this positive approach could bring up their interest within that class and even increase the grade statistics of it. In addition, we hope that the students will be able to network and create healthy relationships with the other students and hopefully be encouraged by them to help out another person in need.

How we built it

We built everything using HTML and CSS, with a bit Javascript.

Challenges we ran into

Most of us do not have coding experience, yet we had so many ideas that we wanted to do. We had to do research prior to building the website, which interfered with our coding time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although we don't have much coding experience, we are happy that we figured out what to do. We thought that by integrating this software into the lives of college students, hopefully, they will be positively impacted by it, allowing them to enjoy the class.

What we learned

We learned how to build a website using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

What's next for uTIPS

We have many ideas for this software. Our ideas include:

Making it accessible throughout all colleges in the world
Start on creating the mobile app version
Working with RateMyProfessor and UTD Grades to help students get a clarity of the specific class
Making it accessible to high schoolers to allow them to ask questions and get responses from college students

-Worked on By Vedha Jonnada, Laasya Gudisa, and Vaishnavi Rao