GatorGuide

Home page 1
Home page 2
Chat bot 1
Scholarship 1
Scholarship 2
Organization 1
Organization 2
Profile

Inspiration

As first-year Computer Science students at the University of Florida, one of the largest universities in the country, we recognized that it was difficult for us, and our peers, to keep up with the abundance of opportunities and resources available to us. The sheer number of organizations was overwhelming, and many resources went unused because students struggled to keep up.

In addition, as women in a male-dominated field, it was easy for us to feel outcasted in our classes. We discovered that student organizations were crucial for social development; they allow students to branch out and meet like-minded individuals, as well as to diversify themselves.

This drove our decision for our project topic, as we wanted to create something that we and our fellow students could benefit from. Thus, GatorGuide was created!

What it does

GatorGuide is a student-developed application designed to assist STEM students in organizing their academic endeavors. GatorGuide allows students to access several STEM resources on campus from one online location. The application features information concerning both large and small STEM organizations on campus, with links to websites, calendars, and more. Students will be able to track upcoming events and find a place where they truly belong on campus, surrounded by like-minded individuals, without feeling overwhelmed by dozens of flyers and social media posts.

In addition, GatorGuide features a scholarship finder, where users can search for scholarships based on their demographics, interests, and more. Many students rely on scholarships to fund their education, and our website features niche scholarships that users can easily apply for and track due dates.

GatorGuide also contains KAPA, an artificially-powered tool available for students to ask for guidance and homework questions!

How we built it

We built GatorGuide using React Native, TypeScript JSX (TSX), Expo, and HTML/CSS for styling. We started our project by installing Expo on our IDE, VS Code, to be able to view the various features on our phones as an application. After that, we created TSX files to represent the different tabs displaying the necessary information. Once we had figured out the main structure of the tabs, our main goal was to improve our UI/UX design and make it the best-looking product. To do so, we implemented images and icons to match what the code displayed, for example, the organizations tab, which displayed the logos of the student organizations at UF to help identify them easily. Ultimately, we focused on the front-end development aspect of this project to present our ideas seamlessly.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we ran into while working on our project was using git commands. As we were all trying to edit the same files to make our desired changes, we could not commit and push our own changes because we ran into issues with merging our changes multiple times. This was one of the hardest challenges as we all contributed to beneficial code that would result in a better end product but by not being able to share our code, we were stuck on how to move forward. However, by researching our issues and keeping track of them, we were able to solve issues with git by ourselves easily towards the end of the project.

Another challenge we ran into was trying to utilize a Google Calendar API in our project. When trying to set up an API, we ran into issues with the authentication process as we couldn’t use our personal emails to internalize the data. Therefore, we had to scratch our plan to utilize an API and came up with the idea to include links to student organization websites where the information about upcoming events is located. In conjunction with this, we also ran into issues when trying to integrate our ChatBot API into our code. However, we were eventually able to get the ChatBot API to display on our ChatBot tab through trial and error of moving around our code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although it was difficult at first to jump into a language we weren’t fully familiar with, we gradually began to understand our code as the hackathon progressed, which is something we are all proud of. Additionally, we are proud that by the end of the hackathon, we were able to implement the majority of the features we originally planned on including.

What we learned

As first-year students, participating in WiNGHacks was undoubtedly an amazing learning experience for us. The majority of us had never worked on the front end before, and this was our first time using React. There was definitely a learning curve for us, but we feel much more comfortable learning and working with react-native after this project.

Through this project, we learned the importance of teamwork and communication in the real world. At first, we divided the project up and began to work on our own, but soon realized that our git commands were overlapping, thus causing an error. This meant that we had to rewrite a lot of our code, and it slowed us down at first. But this “failure” was the best learning lesson, and it taught us that we must communicate every change we make, no matter how small. We learned to share updates and work together on the same computer, rather than as individuals.

What's next for GatorGuide

If time permits, we would like to access UF’s scholarship universe data, in order to provide more scholarship information and make it more niche towards UF students. In addition, we plan to implement an authentication system, where students may log in via Google, Microsoft, or Gatorlink and save their information all in one place. We could also implement a calendar that provides access to all the events from your saved organizations in one place. We plan to implement a community forum where students can connect with industry professionals and student mentors. This platform will allow students to seek guidance, ask questions, and engage in meaningful discussions.