Campus Activity Finder (jayjew)

Home View of Activity Finder

Inspiration

During our first year on campus, we found it difficult to discover and access on-campus events. After surveying our peers, we realized that many students faced the same challenge.

While club events play a crucial role in fostering campus community, some clubs struggle to attract active participants. However, through conversations with students, we found that there is significant interest in these events. This led us to two key conclusions: A) There is a lack of convenient technology for clubs to effectively advertise their events. B) There is no centralized system that consolidates all campus events in one accessible place.

Recognizing this gap, we were inspired to create an interactive map that displays on-campus events, keeping in mind that new students might not have knowledge on campus building whereabouts.

What it does

The Campus Activity Finder has a pannable map that displays the north U of A campus. Clubs or students are able to add events to the map along with the date and time of the event. Students using the web app would be able to see events as pins on the map which correspond to the buildings they are taking place in. Upon clicking the pin they will find the name of the event, and the sidebar gives more info about the event, including date, time, and a link to the event page. The sidebar also contains a list of upcoming and current events that including the details above.

How we built it

Using Flask and NGrok servers, we have used API to communicate between python and javascript files so that we can store the events as objects in a json file to be later processed by the front-end javascript. We have also implemented some javascript back-end to facilitate usability and to animate our page. Since we have a community server, NGrok, we can allow users to view all the activities with ease.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

There is a button to toggle dark mode and color blind mode for the page. The UI is user friendly. The markers that are in close proximity get consolidated into one which expands on the side bar. The web application can make API requests with data between javascript and python.

What we learned

We learned how to tunnel to a local host opened in Flask using NGrok. We also learned how to use the leaflet library which we used to display our map. While fixing bugs and adding features, we became more and more comfortable with the web app; both front and back ends.

What's next for Campus Activity Finder

Currently Campus Activity Finder is only accessible through a tunnel to a localhost, the next thing we would like to implement is to have a web page with its own domain so that anyone can access the link at all times. Mobile devices are not currently compatible with the web application so we would also like to implement a mobile friendly web app. Anyone with access to the link is able to create events, but we would like to make a login authentication for clubs at the U of A or other official events so that their events standout more. Lastly, we want to make a database for all of the pins to store the data in a more secure location and make requests to insert data and query data.