Inspiration: Our. team was inspired by our collective daily need. We all realized how isolating studying felt, and how in some classes we had little to no social contact with others, and just couldn't muster the energy to reach out to other classmates and ask them if they were willing to study together. This collective desire launched StudySwipe: a companion web app for universities, where students can connect and grow together!
What it does: StudySwipe allows students to input their SFU information, and choose which courses in which campus they are enrolled in, once this is done, the students can view who else is in their class, as well as everyone's (online/offline) status. If they see a classmate online, they may send a chat message to that classmate. Hopefully, the main goal of the companion application is that students can meet new classmates and form new study groups, growing both socially and educationally!
How we built it: We built a backend c++ file, which locally stored user information which was input during the sign in process. Once submitted, the c++ file was redirected to our consecutive HTML files, one for the "Enter courses" page, one for the "Main courses" page, one for the "Chats" page, and one for the "My Profile" page. These HTML files are all interconnected through back and submit buttons, and the backend c++ files store the user data which can be pulled all throughout the various frontend HTML files.
Challenges we ran into: None of us had much good experience with HTML, so we had to research and browse a lot of stack overflow for a successful build. We attempted to integrate a comet chat api, but faced challenges with that and ended up doing an inactive, local chat system because of the time limit pressuring us. There was a lot we couldn't finish because of our skill level, but we got a lot done in one day, surely with more time we could make this idea into reality.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: We are proud of our c++ local storage system, which was something completely new for us, though we have some experience with c++.
What we learned: We all collectively learned quite a bit about HTML through research, as well as page directioning, and are grateful for all the stack overflow forums that slowly taught us all about what we wanted to do.
What's next for StudySwipe: We would like to continue working on StudySwipe after the hackathon. To us it seems like a real startup idea, because it is something we all collectively as first year students would like to have in our uni lives. We are sure many other students could sympathize with this statement. In our free times we will continue working on StudySwipe, and hopefully after a couple of months we could even bring this to reality.
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