Inspiration
We've found ourselves in too many situations when studying for an exam or working on a project when there's nobody left to help. Either it's too late to go to office hours, your friends are too busy, or you just don't know anyone in class. It seems like you're all alone, but there's probably at least 5 other people in that same situation.
If only there was a way to find those other people who are working on the same thing as you so you can collaborate...
What it does
Introducing StudyBuddies: the app that helps you to find that last minute study group you've been desperately looking for
After you log in to your account:
- find the course you're working on through our easy to navigate interface (2 clicks or a search away!)
- see all the assignments people are working on for that course
- select an assignment and see it's description and location (e.g. TREX, Olin Library, Kayaks Cafe)
- join that assignment, or create your own study group!
OR
- navigate to the map tab to see all official locations
How We built it
We split it up the tasks to client side and server side.
We built the client side portion of the project by building a native iOS app using swift and xcode. We built the server side portion of the project by setting up an AWS EC2 server with PHP5 and a MySQL database.
We linked the two by sending requests from the client side to the server, which ran a bunch of MySQL queries and sent response back to the client.
Challenges We ran into
Communication between the client and server was a difficult in the beginning, but we decided to use alamofire to send the requests from our iOS app.
We wanted more course data by scraping our universities course listing page, but a .aspx webpage was found too difficult to scrape efficiently, so we manually entered most of the data.
We had one MySQL query that just would not work that stumped us for like 2 hours and worse yet just frustrated us, but we decided to work around it instead of continuing to waste time.
Accomplishments that We're proud of
We're proud of the fact we could use our areas of expertise (client/server) to create something greater than the sum of our individual skills.
In the same vein, we're glad to make an app that has the potential to help students do better in college by fostering collaboration to accomplish more together.
What We learned
Building up an idea from scratch is a slow, iterative process that necessitates collaboration.
Focusing on features that differentiate us is more important that the boring features every app has (e.g. login/account creation).
Planning is essential, but then again no amount of planning will keep you from unexpected roadblocks.
What's next for StudyBuddies
If we decide to continue the project, we'd polish it up and see if we can get it added to the official WUSTL app. Another possibility is to put it up on the app store or pitch our idea and app to other universities that may be interested.
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