Inspiration
Every spring, Duke students receive their room assignment for the coming year. However, the amount of information provided by HRL on the dorms is quite limited, usually only a couple of pictures for each quad or a basic floor plan. As Duke students, we’ve always hoped to see the inside of our future dorm rooms before moving in so we knew what our dorm would look like.
What it does
We wanted to create a way to allow Duke students to help each other see what their upcoming dorm room will look like, as well as share images of their current room to help others. This will be useful for students to plan which belongings to bring for fall move in and will make the transition process to a new room more seamless.
How we built it
For the front-end aspect of our project, we used a template to help build the homepage, but the rest of the tabs within the site were made from scratch using HTML and CSS. On the back-end side, we wrote a simple matching code in Python.
Challenges we ran into
As we are all beginners in web development, it was a little overwhelming at first to try to create something in a short period of time. Because of this, we had to adapt what we already knew and what we could learn to attempt to start coding our idea in a way that was feasible for our experience levels and time available. For example, we decided to make a website because we know more about web development than app development, and we used the skills we learned in the HTML workshop to learn more about front-end development.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Coming in, we all had limited experience in web development, and though attending workshops and beginning to code, we are proud that we were able to gain a better understanding of the many technologies that comprise a website or app. We are happy to have created a simple framework of our app that conveys our idea, although it is not fully functional.
What we learned
We were able to gain familiarity with new technologies, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We all were unfamiliar with how an app or website goes from an idea to a working program, since this was the first hackathon all of us participated in. We have now been able to see a more complete, though compressed, picture of the steps that are necessary to make a product.
What's next for RoomFinder
If we were to go further with this project, we would want to create a bridge between the front-end design and back-end code, possibly using Python with Flask. We would make a database to store the dorm pictures and information that would allow users to see the pictures of the room they request. Additional features we brainstormed include a way to see similar or nearby rooms if the requested room has yet to be uploaded. We also envisioned a secure way to contact the previous occupant of a room in order to discuss more about the layout of the room, such as requesting to contact the current owner through the website. We would also want to work on more CSS elements of the website. We mostly focused on HTML for functionality, but if this was a running website, we would like to make it more aesthetic.
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