Campus Events

Landing page with 7-day event calendar
Landing page in dark mode
Event details modal
Event submission form
Event calendar detailed

Inspiration

The university community at UNSW is vibrant, with over 330 clubs and societies hosting events daily. However, with events scattered across Facebook, Instagram, and Discord, students struggle to stay informed. The official university event page is underutilized and difficult to navigate, leaving many students unaware of what’s happening on campus. Currently, students miss out on great events hosted by amazing societies simply because there’s no visibility—no one knows what's happening next week on campus unless they check every society individually. Our inspiration came from wanting to create a single, complete source of truth where students can easily find and filter all society events, ultimately helping them make the most of their time at UNSW.

What it does

Campus Events is a comprehensive event discovery platform tailored for UNSW students. It allows users to:

Browse through a weekly schedule of events, organized by date and time.
Filter events by type (e.g., workshops, social, academic) and by the society hosting the event.
View detailed event information, including titles, descriptions, dates, and cover photos with a simple click.
See events displayed for the next 7 days on the landing page.

For societies, event submission is simple: they can paste raw event details from platforms like Facebook or Discord, which are processed by our Python-powered backend using Google Generative AI. This AI extracts relevant fields like titles, dates, and descriptions, which the societies can verify before being saved to our database.

How we built it

Our backend is built using FastAPI, which powers the core of our event data handling. Societies input raw event information into a Python-driven interface that hooks into Google Generative AI, which automatically extracts key event fields. Societies can then verify this data before it’s saved to the database. An Events API serves this event data to our frontend, which we built using React/Next.js. The frontend presents a clean and responsive calendar view for students, making it easy to find events happening across campus.

Challenges we ran into

One of our major challenges was integrating the Google Generative AI for extracting relevant event fields from raw inputs like Facebook or Discord posts. Ensuring that the AI worked smoothly and accurately across different formats of event data was a learning curve. We also faced the challenge of building an API that would efficiently serve the event data to the frontend, while maintaining a responsive and scalable user experience as the number of events grows.

Another challenge was that many of the frameworks and technologies we used, such as FastAPI, Next.js, and Google Generative AI, were new to our group. We had to learn and implement these tools quickly to deliver the functionality we envisioned.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re particularly proud of our decision to use generative AI to validate event fields in real-time, streamlining the user experience for societies submitting events. This has greatly simplified the event publishing process and ensures the data is accurate. We’re also proud of how much we’ve learned about frontend development, having significantly improved our skills in building a responsive and intuitive user interface with React/Next.js.

What we learned

This is our first hackathon, and we learned a lot about project management and teamwork. We successfully split the project into manageable parts, assigning each person’s individual (and growing) set of skills to the appropriate areas. This approach helped us efficiently develop both the frontend and backend, while learning new frameworks and technologies along the way. The experience has given us confidence in how we can collaborate effectively in future projects.

What's next for Campus Events

Our next steps for Campus Events involve enhancing the platform’s filters to offer even more precise event search options. We’re also focused on optimizing the responsiveness of the site to ensure students can access event information as quickly as possible. To kickstart the platform, we plan to bootstrap the events database by working with several CSE-related societies and populating it with their upcoming events. Additionally, we aim to make Campus Events so easy to use that it becomes the first stop for societies when publishing their events. We’ll also seek user feedback to continuously improve the platform and solidify it as the go-to tool for event discovery at UNSW.