Reprose

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Inspiration

Our journey began with a passion for literature, coding and a desire to make reading more accessible to everyone. We recognized that traditional methods of book lending and borrowing were often inaccessible to most, so we set out to create a digital solution that would significantly simplify the process.

We as a team felt the need for such an app as it allows students like us to find very affordable books at a fraction of the cost of the new books. This would even reduce the financial burden on families that find difficulties financing their children’s education.

Furthermore, since our app is a digital solution, it would be able to reach many more people, thus providing everyone an opportunity to access a diverse range of books. This could include students who need books that might not be available in their libraries or adults who have a passion for reading and learning. Fostering this access to knowledge goes a long way in enhancing learning experiences.

Additionally, selling used books to others could help generate all important income (which we as students know to be so so precious) from selling once-loved books to help another student in need.

An important reason for creating this app is that despite the fact that we feel that the world is rapidly moving into the online realm, there are billions of children aged 3 to 17, who have very limited access to digital literacy and online resources for education. Neither do they have the resources and money to set it up which creates the massive digital divide today. Through the implementation of just one app per household, we can help bridge this divide and allow all children to have necessary learning materials.

We created this app with the intention of being able to eventually share valuable data to educators and institutions about which textbooks are in high demand, helping them make informed decisions about curriculum development and resource allocation. In this way, we hope we are able to give back to the publishing world as well.

What it does

Our app is designed to connect students and book enthusiasts, making it easier than ever to share the books you love. Here's what our app facilitates:

Effortless Book Lending: Easily lend your books to friends, family, and fellow bookworms with just a few clicks. No longer is lending your books out a project that's eternally on your to do list. Seamless Borrowing: Browse a vast collection of books available for borrowing. Find your next literary adventure without the hassle of searching through labyrinthine libraries or bookstores. Smart Selling: Have books you're ready to part with? List them for sale within the app and connect with potential buyers in your area. User-Friendly Interface: Our app features an intuitive interface that's simple to navigate, ensuring a hassle-free experience for all users. In doing so ReProse creates a free online community where you can lend, borrow, and sell books. Users can start browsing the ReProse catalog to find books they’d like to borrow or purchase. When they find a book they’re interested in, they get connected to the seller to allow them to communicate with each other to decide further details such as pick up location, date, time etc.

How we built it

We built the web-app completely in house, from scratch using django as the chosen web framework to integrate the functionality provided by Python with the aesthetics coded into the HTML and CSS. Concerning the python back-end, the storage of customer information was made possible through django’s database interface, to perform efficient operations on an sqlite database. Through this, we developed a secure system to maintain accounts in the app. When it came to optimizing the user experience, we integrated an SMTP service into the app which automatically emails the user to keep them updated with their orders and listings. This minimizes the need for human intervention in the app’s everyday operation, an essential part of the business model that this app promises to build. On the front end, the beautiful designs were curated based on our carefully chosen color palette to give the app as welcoming a feel as possible. Harnessing the power of CSS meant we could effectively implement any design idea we had, no matter how ambitious it sounded. When designing our UX, we made sure the user contact points with the app were as intuitive as possible, to give a seamless journey with our app to any user.

Challenges we ran into

Building the website from scratch was a big ordeal because we would need to deal with the intricacies of the tools we were working with: CSS, HTML and django. Getting a hang of them was a progressive task that was difficult at first. It was frustrating to see the code not resulting in what we had initially imagined but as our experience grew, we became more fluent at design. We certainly are more confident in the language we worked with because of having developed this app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating ReProse, an app for aiding the collective and contributing to social betterment from the ground up is a feat that makes us proud. We feel that we have been able to contribute to society by harnessing the power of software and this fulfills our role as developers and social entrepreneurs. Seeing the finished app itself was a gratifying feeling because it is a large and complex system that we put together to be able to achieve the task of providing a seamless book lending, selling and borrowing experience. To think of the brainstorming process

What we learned

Most obviously, we learnt to master the use of CSS, HTML and Django. These were the technical skills we gained from building a software project. But hackathons are a time to expand beyond just being builders and to explore your role in the real world. Having been given the theme of education we started to reflect about our own education journey and sympathize with those of others.Through this we move closer to mastering an essential skill any inventor or designer has to have: empathy. We all started to appreciate how the solution becomes so much better when it's targeted at the real problems that real people on the ground face. We thus embark on a learning journey towards becoming better design thinkers.

What's next for Project ReProse

Chat feature: In the near future our app will feature a chat option to allow interested users to communicate with each other to decide further details such as pick up location, date, time etc for a smooth transaction. This is for those who are not comfortable in sharing their contact details on a public platform.

Secure transactions: Along with adding the chat feature we will be adding a deposit fee for when users are borrowing books, ensuring they are returned back to the owner within the given time period.

Expand our project from just exchanging books to several mundane, tradable commodities. There are several people who require certain items for short periods of time such as when guests are over but they do not have the resources and space to purchase new items. Creating a community for the lending and borrowing of such miscellaneous goods could create significant convenience in the life of several and significantly reduce resource waste. People no need to buy new items for single use, thus making our project a possible driver of a more sustainable future!