-
-
Home Page For Our Website
-
Engineering Page
Submission for First Flight
Inspiration
Our inspiration is from our own experiences as students, especially from struggling to study/practice for classes without enough resources. Therefore, we wanted to create a website that included resources such as YouTube playlists, textbooks, past exams, and practice websites for popular STEM courses to help other students easily find more methods of improving their skills in their respective courses. Since we are all STEM majors, we decided to do STEM courses so that we relate more to the courses.
What it does
Our website provides free resources for common STEM courses. Under each letter we have a list of related courses, and under each course we have several resources. The resources are hyperlinked, and they are opened in a new window.
How we built it
First, we created a list of courses that many students take for each category in STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We each focused on a category and found helpful resources for each course within it and created an excel spreadsheet with the links. Then, we started creating the website using HTML to create a basic structure which included headings, buttons, and links to different pages and back. Once we finished the basic structure, we implemented CSS styles to make the website more aesthetically pleasing.
Challenges we ran into
Throughout the course of our working process, we encountered several challenges. Since this was our first hackathon, we initially struggled with trying to brainstorm ideas that were feasible for all our skillsets. After coming up with our idea though, we were then struggling to figure out what exactly we needed to do to accomplish our goal, whether it was to implement a database or backend. After talking to mentors, we realized that based off our idea, it would be best to focus on a front end and statically integrate our resources into our website rather than trying to create a database unnecessarily. Another challenge we encountered was that we wanted to try to create a website using React. We faced difficulties with downloading it which ate up a sizable portion of our time, so we decided to use HTML and CSS for our website instead. Throughout the coding portion of our project, we faced merger conflicts and centering issues but also trying to get each page to be uniform.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are all very proud to have completed a project. Some of us learned new languages, or revisited languages that we were unfamiliar with. So, learning all of the necessary tools in a short timeframe was something we are proud to have accomplished. We are also proud to have graphics on our page since we did not use React in this project. We used Canva for the images and then used them as the background for the website. We are proud of how we overcame our disadvantages.
What we learned
From this hackathon, we learned the importance of planning and having different frameworks installed beforehand to ensure that we do not lose time doing so next time. Technically, we all either learned HTML/CSS from scratch or brushed up on our skills. We also learned more about front end in general, especially because we were all inexperienced in that area beforehand. We also learned that we could utilize other resources such as Canva to work with HTML, which allowed us to include more graphics to make our website more visually pleasing.
What's next for UF Study Resource
We had several other ideas that we wanted to implement but given our time constraints we were not able to do so. This includes having a feedback form so that users can suggest new courses to add or other resources. We also wanted to have a comment section, so that other students can describe their experiences using our study resources. This would require a log-in page and a back end. If we had more experience with back-end development and more time we would be able to accomplish this, so in the future this could be a potential update.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.