Knack

Knack is a platform for students to automatically find and join groupchats (KnackChats) with other students enrolled in their classes along with a safe platform (KnickKnacks) to trade items with peers

Comment

Inspiration

The most important person in your class is one that sometimes you never even meet in person, it's the student who makes the GroupMe chat. This class hero creates and sends a link to a private groupchat to everyone on the class email list at the beginning of each semester. But these valiant students are sometimes few and far between, with serial groupmakers taking their roles and everyone waiting for someone else to make the groupchat, sometimes it never happens and students go through the semester feeling alone. Others join the class late and miss the initial link with no way to find the group on their own without the private link. Besides, the most popular groupchat platform GroupMe has most recently been the most popular hub for scams, specifically people posing as students selling concert tickets that don't exist as noted in an official Binghamton University scam notice posted in January 2024. link With three out of three of our group members having experienced or witnessed the above situations in the past month, we created Knack.

What it does

Knack is a webapp that features two main goals, to bring classmates together in groupchats called KnackChats and provide a safe marketplace between members of the campus community. When a student signs up with Knack and verifies their Binghamton email, they can join KnackChats which are accessible to students who are mutually enrolled in the same classes. Knack also leverages the Binghamton University authentication to create a marketplace called KnickKnacks. This platform makes it easier and safer than ever to buy and sell class materials and other items with students previously enrolled in the same courses and anyone within the campus community powered by AI image to text generation making listing items a breeze.

How we built it

Our application is based on Next JS, a React framework in JavaScript, using Tailwind CSS for styling and Tesseract.js for our image processing.

Challenges we ran into

As we learned, the things we expect to be the easiest turn out to be the hardest. We fell into the trap of GitHub merge conflicts between our team members after we had meticulously planned every step to prevent this from happening. We found the culprit to be a slight difference between the git switch command and the git checkout command that created divergences between teammates' branches. Our team was also imminent and optimistic about the implementation of a MongoDB server for data storage when a user creates a profile or a new item listing. However, attempting to implement this after we had spent a large amount of effort working on each of our designated coding areas with various data outputs proved difficult and had to be cut for the purpose of this competition but it will be implemented soon, we were close… I know it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of what each team member has accomplished, both individually and together as a group. We each brainstormed and put all of our ideas into one and generated a vision board workflow to guide us like a candle throughout the night, and we are happy to have made at least some of our ambitions come to life link . We each took a part of the project upon ourselves, focusing on our strengths and we can confidently say that we put our best effort into this project for the entire 24 hours, clocking in at an average of less than 1000 steps since the hackathon began (don’t worry, we will exercise tomorrow.. after we sleep.)

What we learned

We have learned more than we thought was possible about creating webapps using React and creating workflows. Having a plan and executing it well is always harder and will take longer than it seems so we learned we need to plan for the unplanned even with a foolproof plan (even the unsinkable can sink). We entered with only hearing about these various elements used to create web apps

What's next for Knack

We have a deep connection with our idea behind Knack and are looking forward to implementing all of the ideas we had along the way over the past 24 hours but did not get to add including further AI capabilities with suggestive products and backend server integration as well as UI Updates. We believe in Knack for the greater good fostering a welcoming and safer environment within our Binghamton University campus community and additional campuses in the future.

Share this project:

Updates