Lecture Free

The app helps students at UTS find campus events that they can attend in between their classes.

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Inspiration

The inspiration behind this project came from the common experience of having gaps in the university timetable, where students often find themselves bored with nothing to do. The idea was to create a solution that would help students make the most of their free time by attending campus events, allowing them to live a more vibrant and engaging university life.

What it does

LectureFree allows users to input their personal timetable (via an ICS calendar) and automatically find campus events they can attend during their free time between classes. It helps users make the most of their schedule by suggesting events they may be interested in, based on their available time slots.

How we built it

We started by building the backend with FastAPI, which handles the core functionality and API interactions. A Playwright scraper was used to extract event details from the activate uts events page. This scraper runs on a cronjob every 30 minutes to update the content. The frontend was then developed with React to provide a user-friendly interface. The project uses MongoDB to store data related to events and user information.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we encountered during the development process included properly modeling the data, working asynchronously as a team, planning the project, and dealing with unexpected bugs and quirks. Deployment also posed some challenges, but we managed to overcome them as the project progressed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're most proud of the accuracy of the data, as the system reliably provides all the necessary event information to the user. It works seamlessly and provides a real benefit to users by suggesting relevant events.

What we learned

One of the key lessons we learned from this project is the importance of planning everything in advance—especially the frontend, backend, data models, and their interactions. It became clear that getting stuck in development because of unclear direction is not ideal. Proper planning is crucial for smooth progress and success.

What's next for University Event Calendar

Looking ahead, we plan to add a login feature, notifications, and the ability for users to view their friends' timetables. This will allow students to plan to attend events together and make the most of their university experience.

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