RMIT Exponent

Team Members

• Dario Killenberger
• Chan Cheuk Hin Andrew
• Beatrice Pang
• Nicholas Doublet
• Joshua James / Catherine Jane Moylan

Repository

https://github.com/chan-cheuk-hin/rmit-hackathon

Inspiration

This project was inspired by a desire to see something like this in real life. Catherine posited the idea to the group as they wished they had more opportunities to be featured in student exhibitions, and felt that being presented the opportunity to see what other students are up to would help build the RMIT community.

What it does

In a full implementation (not a prototype), our app catalogues student projects that they wish to feature in a student exhibition, and create exhibitions based on what tags the projects had in common. Is there 5 #physics projects, 3 #chemistry projects, and 2 #biology projects waiting to be seen by the world? The platform will then automatically attempt to host a #csit expo for all 10 on a suitable date.

How we built it

Our submission implements AJAX in React to fetch data hosted by a PHP/SQL backend.

Challenges we ran into

We were initially worried that we wouldn't be able to use our existing React knowledge to do the exact things we wanted to do, but our group's combined experience with Vanilla JS pulled us through in many of these regards.

What we learned

I helped make a React component, introducing me to React - Catherine

I got some backend experience from my fellow team members - Dario

I learnt how to make an API to send and receive JSON data in PHP - Andrew

What's next for RMIT Exponent (by Segfault Sufferers)

This could be used as a prototype demonstration to petition RMIT to consider something like this. Currently, there is a gap - the staff can organise an expo, but can't anticipate how many students have projects. Also, students won't prepare projects for expos because they have no idea there will be one. Creating something like this could really get the ball rolling for student recognition and also expanding on the university's community.

Built With

• mysql
• php
• react