Cheapy

A website to make all discounts at local restaurants, services, and attractions easily accessible to USC students.

Comment

What it does

Cheapy is a website that allows USC students to easily search through discounts that are available to them as a college student or a member as a recognized club through collecting data from a mass spreadsheet.

How we built it

First, we conducted research on student discounts offered for USC students. From there, we found that specific clubs, especially cultural organizations, have membership discounts from sponsors. We combined student discounts for all USC students and membership discounts for different clubs onto a mass Google spreadsheet. Then we extracted a .JSON file from the spreadsheet, fetched our researched data through Javascript, and displayed it in HTML on our website.

Challenges we ran into

This was the first time we looked into using spreadsheets to display data using Javascript; we needed a mentor to help us through the process of converting our first spreadsheet into HTML, which took several hours. We also had very limited experience with GitHub and Git so we needed help learning how to push and pull code to collaborate live. Many of our initially-planned features, such as a personal budget with data visualization and web scraping for physical stores with student discounts, had to be removed for the sake of time and difficulty.

What we learned

How to display data in a .JSON file in HTML. How to choose a color palette, make a logo in Adobe Illustrator, and design a website for branding. How to collaborate code live with GitHub.

Accomplishments we are proud of

For some of us, this was our first hackathon and one of the first exposures to coding we've had. For all of us, this was our first exposure to back-end coding. We're proud of what we've been able to accomplish in terms of creating a full stack website given the time constraints.

What's next for Cheapy

  1. Track students' savings through real-time data based on their transaction history
  2. Help students easily budget with data visualization
  3. Automatically discover businesses with student discounts by web scraping
  4. Display nearby physical locations that have been identified as providing discounts using the Yelp API

Opt-in categories

We hope to qualify for "Best Beginner Hack" and Bloomberg's "Best Hack in Finance" as we are all beginners in back-end coding (some of us for coding and hackathons in general) and our website aims to help students save money by utilizing the monetary benefits they are offered.

Share this project:

Updates