EventIt

Inspiration

Our team is full of students who are constantly struggling to effectively organise events as many of us are a part of student clubs that have over hundreds of members. Being a part of an organising team which often consists of more than 15 people, we find it very difficult to keep track of all our team members and tasks that are being delegated to each person. Such task delegation is usually done through a messy and disorganised excel sheet which also proves incredibly inaccessible during the time of the actual event. Hence, our inspiration for EventIt, which allows event organisers to keep track of tasks, members and make event information accessible to everyone.

What it does

It is essentially an assistant which keeps track of a team's tasks, members, event schedule and allows team members to alert others if a mid-event emergency arises. Keeping track of one's personalised tasks would allow each member to focus solely on their own responsibilities. A global outline of the event schedule would give everyone a universal understanding of the event's outline, the preparation required prior to the event and the time needed to pack up right after. Furthermore, emergency alerts would send push notifications to every member's devices and prompts them to take on the emergency task as quick as possible.

How we built it

We began our journey through an ideation phase, where we thought of ideas that we all empathised with. We moved on to our design phase, where we drew wireframes for each potential mobile screen on a different piece of paper with labels to indicate each widget's use and how the screens are linked to one another. Then we continued to read Flutter's online documentation and researched more about its widgets. Moreover, we have some team members working on the database using Firebase while others focused on front-end using Flutter to create our first layout. As we finished our screens, we proceeded to connect our back-end to our front-end to create a finished working product. From there, we gave further consideration to the app's usability and made enhancements to its style.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge is familiarising ourselves with Flutter as many of us are very new to the language and have to learn it under a very short period of time. Getting to know the many widgets as well and how they could be positioned posed as a momentous learning curve for everyone in the team. We also thought that those of us who are responsible for front-end and back-end should understand each other's tasks and needs and accomodate to each other as the process of connecting our front-end and back-end has been rather ineffective.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud to have made a working prototype under such a short period of time and under large amounts of pressure. Furthermore, having the opportunity to work in a wonderful and diverse team allows us to actively learn from each other and really supports immense growth in an unbelievably short amount of time. Being able to learn a new language has also proven to give us all confidence boosters, which can give further inspiration to future ideas and collaborations as well.

What we learned

We quickly realised that given the scope that we are given, we would like to plan more realistically for the amount of work that we are capable of doing under a 24-hour time period. Although this limits the amount of work that we are capable of doing, we realise that it is important to remain grounded within these limitations. Furthermore, we learned so much about Flutter's widgets and how we could potentially use them in the future for possible ideas as well.

What's next for 5

We may continue developing this app after the hack, especially because it is such a fun task and something that we can all truly empathise with. It is a product that we would actually like to use in our daily lives and we would love to see it come to fruition. Otherwise, we have also brainstormed of other ideas that aren't possible to create due to the time constraints of the hackathon that we would also like to pursue together.