Inspiration
Using technology to help underprivileged kids to provide equitable access of educational resources.
What it does
The web application takes a valid ISBN number and displays all of the Book's information. The main purpose of the website was to allow kids to look up a book via ISBN number and determine the Lexile reading level and categories of the book. Our program fetches the data using an API request and displays all the information. Librarians can also add in new books via an ISBN number into their existing database and view their database. Finally, children can then check out books via ISBN or the database and it will send them a message that gives them a date to return the book by. Each action updates the database accordingly.
How we built it
Our web application was built using HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB, and Twilio SMS API.
Challenges we ran into
Our main challenge was extracting all possible data such as the title, Lexile number, category, etc. simply using an ISBN value.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Though most of us weren't well versed in MongoDB, we were still able to integrate the database and design the system overall. We were also proud of incorporating the Twilio API which notifies the user once they check out a book.
What we learned
We became more familiar with MongoDB and vanilla JavaScript. We also learned how to parse JSON files and learned a lot about how to integrate APIs into our code.
What's next for Children's Library
Our next goal would be to incorporate a barcode scanner rather than having the librarians manually input the ISBN. On top of that, we'd also like to implement a search-by-title feature rather than just the ISBN.
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