UMass Dorms

Inspiration

We were inspired by RateMyProfessor.com, RateMyDorm.com, and the personal frustrations we faced when we first had to decide on a dorm. We had to dig deep on the web for dorm pictures and personally reach out to students to learn about the dorms. We wanted to create something that is easily accessible to new and old students who want to figure out where they want to live on campus.

What it does

Our website’s main gimmick is a review system where students can write reviews about their dorming experience, give it a rating out of 5, and upload pictures of their rooms. Others can read these reviews and utilize them to decide on a dorm. For new students, our website has a short quiz to give them recommendations for residential areas based on their personal living preferences. We also included general information about each residential area.

How we built it

We started by designing and sketching out the website on paper. Then we went on to use the Bootstrap framework to design our front end. The HTML/CSS workshop served as a good introduction to the front end since one of us didn’t have any web development experience at all. After developing a functional web page, we implemented the back end, such as the review system and the quiz, using Python and Flask.

Challenges we ran into

Our original team members weren’t too familiar with the technologies used, so they bailed out. Only 2 of us were left to finish the project to an MVP. We also face technical challenges like saving user-generated reviews and image data from the web page. Since the front end was new to one of us, it took us a while to learn and adapt to Boostrap and have something functional.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our first hackathon, so we are pretty proud that we could finish and decently polish a functional website in 24 hours. We are also proud that even though a part of our team left, we were able to stick to the end and submit something.

What we learned

We learned a lot about front-end development, especially using a CSS framework like Bootstrap. We also learned a lot at the workshops. The Arduino workshop was new and very interesting to us. We definitely want to get involved with more hardware in the future.

What's next for UMass Dorms

What we submitted is just a first prototype, there are so many more features that we can add and so much more polishing we can do. We haven’t explored much about the animation side of web programming. Our original idea included a tagging system, categorical ratings, custom UIs, and mobile implementation. We couldn’t get all these done in just 24 hours, but we can definitely continue the project in the future.