Inspiration
A group of students had just arrived on campus. They were excited about starting their studies but also felt anxious about the challenges they might face. Some struggled to communicate in a language that was not their own, while others felt intimidated by the cultural or ethnic differences they encountered. Despite these challenges, the students were determined to make the most of their experience. They attended orientation sessions, joined clubs and societies, and tried to interact with their classmates as much as possible. But they still felt like something was missing they were feeling lost and alone on their own college campus. This has been experienced by all the founders of the website. They searched on Google for an app or website to connect with other students on campus but did not find anything. So, they found a gap in this segment and started building a website that can help introverts and people with insecurities, connect with others on campus.
What it does
Our website would allow students to log in with their school email, ensuring that all users were verified members of the campus community, and the python program had a milestone tracking feature that required users to complete certain tasks and activities before they could fully connect with others. This ensured that users could only talk to people they had gotten to know and trusted. How We Built it Our journey started with a desire to create an app that would bring people together on the university campus. But after brainstorming we decided to build a website. After all, we discussed what features we wanted to include in the app. We knew we wanted to keep the app simple and straightforward, so we decided to limit the number of people who could connect at a given time, to six. The next step was to figure out how to randomly connect people without revealing their personal information such as name, sex, or major. We created a protoype with basic struture of only backend as we could not complete the front-end on time. It was a race aainst time so, we just finsihed up the back-end and simplified the features of our project.
Challenges we ran into
We only had one person on the team who knew how to code, and he was pressured to complete the backend of the app quickly. The other team members had little to no experience coding in Python and struggled to create the perfect framework for the app. Despite these challenges, the team was determined to make the website a reality. They tried different frameworks, like Flask and Bubble.io, but we quickly realized that we were in over their heads. As the deadline approached, our team was feeling stressed and overwhelmed. We weren't sure if they would be able to complete the app on time, and we were worried that we had bitten off more than we could chew. But then something amazing happened. Then we started to collaborate more closely, sharing our ideas, and working together to overcome their challenges. We reached out for help when we needed it, and we started to see progress. By the end of the 24 hours, our team had created a basic prototype for their social media app. It wasn't perfect, but it was a start. We knew that they still had a long way to go, but they were proud of what we had accomplished something than nothing.
Accomplishments that we’re proud of
Successfully able to understand the issues of the target audience. We are proud that our team has created a way to help people, who find it challenging to connect with other people.
What we learned
We learned how to use the Flask framework, Python, and different Python modules such as OpenAI, Socket, and Threading. We also used a little bit of JS and HTML. Other team members with entrepreneurial mindsets learned valuable skills such as structuring the website, including frontend, backend, databases, load balancing, and other key principles. We learned how to work under pressure. We failed several times, but due to the team's good dynamics, we were able to cope and solve problems with everyone's cooperation. However, what we learned the most was how to efficiently work under a deadline and how important it is for the team not only to have good skills but also to have good interpersonal relationships.
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