Groops

• 

  Login Page

• 

  Groop page

• 

  Event page

Inspiration

We are all in clubs on campus that have large events. There is always a struggle with communication, planning, and information on a large scale, so we wanted to make something that would help fix those problems.

What it does

The main component of our application is the groops. These organizations currently have two main sides: members and events. Each groop has members, and each member can be part of multiple groops. Being a member of a groop means that each member gets notifications about that groop's events and has access to that groop's calendar. An event page is created by a group, and has information about the event as well as assigning people certain roles, i.e. bringing food or cleaning up. The goal is to make accessing groop and event information as fast and easy as possible.

How we built it

We decided to use Django to create the application since we have the most experience with Python. Each of the three main objects is their own app and model within the Django program, and the information about each is then displayed through their respective web pages. All information is stored in a MySQL server, rather than the Django default of SQLite.

Challenges we ran into

Learning Django in 36 hours was tough, and the majority of the time was spent debugging it. It took us a long time to figure out how we were going to get Django to do what we wanted it to. In the end, we struggled with using the HTML along with our limited knowledge of Django to receive and display information.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

While far from finished, it feels satisfying to at least have gotten our knowledge of Django to the point where we can create a small website the contains information based on a custom model we stored. Even though it is missing a lot, it still feels like we have a good base and can continue to build on it to make Groop into something we can use like we originally planned.

What we learned

Be careful learning something completely new at a hackathon! While it was fun to learn Django, in the end just learning the base level of knowledge necessary to use it took a long time and took a lot of the focus away from actually designing an application based on our vision. We also learned a lot about using GitHub to manage a project of larger scale compared to most of our in-class projects and homework.

What's next for Groops

We would really like to continue development on Groop in order to get it into a usable form. Our next steps would be to refine the ability to create and manage Groops, as well as continue to modify the HTML and CSS into something that is much more visually appealing than we already have. While we chose Django for the hackathon due to our knowledge of Python, now that there is no stress of time we can consider switching it to another framework like Javascript even though it would take more studying and learning on our part. Overall this is a project that we can see lots of use for just in our own lives, which provides us with lots of motivation to continue learning and working on it even after the hackathon.

Built With

• css
• django
• html
• mysql
• python