BullsArchive

Providing past resources for students to excel in their courses.

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Inspiration

The BullsArchive team was inspired by the dedication of students to shine in their courses and their desire for additional material to hone their skills. We believe a student's ambition shouldn't be hindered by the lack of resources for them to excel.

What it does

BullsArchive gives past students a platform to upload PowerPoints, practice exams, and other archived content of college courses they have already taken to give future students the opportunity to gain extra practice and get ahead of their curriculum.

How we built it

We built our site to web scrape course data from the University of South Florida using BeautifulSoup. We then stored these courses as well as dedicated destinations for their student-uploaded content on MongoDB Atlas, a scalable multi-cloud database perfect for our project. In the front-end, we used React and Tailwind CSS to implement the tile display system that pops up as users search for their desired courses.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge came up while developing the user upload system in MongoDB Atlas, when we realized Atlas could not store PDFs. We immediately found our solution using Multer, a middleware for handling multipart form data, allowing Atlas to store PDFs.

Another challenge was the massive strain on computer resources that comes with loading the over 3000 courses that USF offers on our tile display system. Our solution was to wait for the user to type in the search box before loading possible matches, reducing the loading time for a sleeker user experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to contribute to a supportive work culture among students by jumpstarting a community of upperclassmen who provide for their juniors, those juniors rise up as seniors, and then they provide for their juniors, creating a cycle of an ever-growing archive of course content for all to study from. By helping each other, everyone wins.

What we learned

With courses closing at the end of every semester, it's a waste to lose all those resources that could have just the thing a lowerclassmen needs to get the hang of a concept or answer a problem. The simple ability to look through all things related to your course can make a big difference to students both struggling to keep up or wanting to know more.

What's next for BullsArchive

In our limited time, we were only able to develop a simple home page to search for courses, but still connected to MongoDB Atlas to host the web-scraped USF course list and potential files associated to those courses. With a more generous development period, we can grow our site to feature a user-ready file uploading system, where they can contribute to and learn from all of our pages for every USF course.

In the far future, we see business potential in our file archiving site to host court cases, research papers, and other frequently referenced content across a variety of professions. As a place for seniors to provide for their juniors, BullsArchive could thrive as the number one platform for advancing users' careers with the help from those who have already been through the same before.

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