UCSC Info

An all-in-one UCSC website with a news feed, course search, dining hall menu, and AI.

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Inspiration

As students at UCSC, we often need quick access to a variety of information, such as dining hall menus and next quarter’s class offerings. Unfortunately, this information is spread out and buried across multiple websites, most of which are poorly designed for mobile use. To solve this, we set out to build an all-in-one website that’s cross-platform, user-friendly, and easily accessible on both desktop and mobile devices.

What it does

Our site features a unified newsfeed that aggregates news from various departments into a single, consistent stream for easy browsing with the ability to filter news by department. The dining hall menu page compiles meal information from all UCSC dining locations, presenting it in a clear and convenient layout. Students can also search for courses across different quarters and view detailed class information. Additionally, we’ve included a personalized briefing tab on the dashboard, powered by Google Gemini, to provide users with summaries of on the latest happenings at UCSC. The entire site is fully responsive, ensuring a smooth experience on both desktop and mobile devices. We've also added a site-wide dark/light mode toggle for customizable viewing.

How we built it

We did not use any UI libraries and rolled all our CSS ourselves. Our backend, written in Python, scrapes and processes the data off UCSC's websites and serves it as an API to our frontend, which was written in React. We did not use any UI libraries for this project and rolled all our UI ourselves.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into for this project is the responsive design. From the start, we wanted to ensure cross-platform accessibility on the site and we had to spent a significant amount of time attempting to reduce create a good, scalable UI that is clean and fast.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of our responsive design on our webpage and its cross-platform usability. We are also incredibly proud that we didn't use any UI frameworks and managed to create a good looking UI from scratch all on our own. We are also incredibly proud that we managed to build these tools in under 48 hours.

What we learned

We learned a lot about good website design and how to design responsive and user-friendly interfaces. We learned how to create layouts that adapt seamlessly across different screen sizes and devices, ensuring a consistent and accessible user experience on both desktop and mobile. We also learned how to create a robust backend API that is both fast and reliable.

What's next for UCSC Info

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