Office Ours

Have you ever been sweating over an assignment as the due date inches closer with no office hours that fit your schedule to get help? We’ve all been there, and that’s why we built Office Ours!

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Inspiration

One of the most frustrating situations as a student is being stuck on a problem or project with no office hours session that fits into your schedule. This often leads to students feeling hopeless and lost, with no guidance from the course staff.

As a result, students who do not have availability to attend office hours have no structured way to connect with course staff or even peers that face similar challenges, leading to a waste of time and missed learning opportunities.

What it does

Office Ours is a platform that allows students facing similar issues to connect with one another, especially during times where traditional office hours are unavailable or scheduling conflicts arise. Office Ours students to create or join study sessions specific to a class and topic, making it easy to tackle the same problems or even to study.

How we built it

After brainstorming and finalizing our idea, we decided to have Supabase as our database, powering user authentication and data storage. We decided to go with Supabase since it integrates a remote PostgreSQL with additional functionality like user verification smoothly. We built our own middleware functionality using the Supabase client for API calls, which we connected to our React frontend that allows users to create and view study sessions. Additionally, we used Google Maps API to display study sessions on campus in a concise and clean manner.

Challenges we ran into

We faced a number of technical and logistical challenges while developing our project. Initially, delegating tasks effectively was a challenge because we were unsure how to efficiently split work between group members while avoiding redundancy and merge conflicts. To combat this we had in depth discussions and drafted plans before delegating tasks.

Another challenge we ran into was integrating together different components of the project that each group member was working on. This task was difficult because we wanted to avoid breaking existing functionality and using up too much time. To combat this we did quick collective code reviews when merging our implementations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have created a functional website that helps students have an alternative to traditional office hours. Especially integrating different technologies together which we do not have the most experience using. Specifically, integrating Supabase, React, and Google Maps API in tandem into one cohesive platform.

What we learned

Throughout this project, we learned how to handle real-time data, authentication and connecting to an external API to ensure that users had a full experience using our website. We also learned effective collaborative skills when developing a project with a cross-functional team. Most importantly, we were able to create a platform that assists in the accessibility and collaboration of students.

What's next for Office Ours

For the future, we would like to add more features, such as real-time messaging and reminders for upcoming study sessions, improved connectivity with course systems (such as Canvas, Google Calendar and more) and adapting this website into a mobile app. Ultimately, we would want Office Ours to become a go-to space where students can collaborate and learn amongst one another to build academic relationships that can be used in place of traditional office hours.

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