Inspiration
Being a first generation hispanic college student I know first hand what it’s like to be overwhelmed by the college system. A large majority of hispanic students don’t know they have access to financial aid, and therefore they do not go to college. I envisioned a web app that could inform those who are uninformed and help bridge the gap between those hispanic students. As well as bridge language gaps between parents and the college system and help them understand exactly how to do things such as fill out a fafsa form. To foster a community of empowered latinos to be ready for life’s next biggest challenge.
What is does
The program is meant for juniors and seniors who will become first-generation college students. The website is supposed to educate kids and adults on the basics on applying to college and is supposed to give them resources on how to apply to fafsa and understand what out-of-state tuition means.
How we built it
We used HTML and CSS for the frontend and for the backend we used Python utilizing flask as our framework as well as SQLite for our database.
Challenges we ran into
We had several challenges along the way, such as understanding how to get our api key to work, since we were having problems with the api key not responding thus not allowing us to use the AI chatbot. We also had other problems such as determining why some of the buttons were not responding properly and taking us to different pages of the website. We were able to work through some of these challenges by analyzing what was wrong in the code and using debugging methods to see what the program was outputting.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were very proud of our chatbot since we had never worked with open API. This was a huge feat for our team, and we learned a lot of valuable problem-solving skills.
What's next for Sube tu Sueños
We want to make the program much more scalable and robust. This can be done by making the chatbot more friendly and explaining topics simpler. We also want to make the live chat fully functional, so students and parents are able to connect with mentors. We also want to make more web pages where actual information can be found regarding colleges and what programs they are known for.
What we learned
We learned a lot of things while coding our project, the biggest one was problem-solving and working as a team. We learned how to debug like a software engineer and to manage all of the workload amongst our teammates.
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