UniFlow - Crowd Tracker

Have you ever had a hard time looking for a study spot because everywhere you go, the spot is crowded? UniFlow is a crowd tracker for UNSW that helps students find a peaceful spot to study or chill.

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Inspiration

All of our team members are UNSW students, as students who want to study at school during the break between classes, before or after class, or maybe in our free time, we all know how hard it is to find a study spot. What we experience every time we look for a spot to study is that we will walk around the campus just to find an empty space to study. We sail through every floor and every spot that we know. Guess what? The spot is always full and crowded. Going to school itself already takes time; moreover, we have to take a long break again just to know where to study. Coming from that issue, we realized that it will be great if there is a crowd tracker that could know the crowd in each building at UNSW. At last, we decided to create a website called UniFlow.

What it does

UniFlow is a useful website to track the crowd around UNSW. It shows the map of the UNSW Campus, and there are indicators in every building to indicate the crowd inside that building. It also counts the number of people inside the building. From that number, the website ranked the top 3 busiest buildings in the UNSW at that time.

How we built it

The website is built from scratch using JavaScript as the main programming language. We use GitHub as a middleman for the Render to access our code. For the backend, we utilize JavaScript as the language, Render to create public URL and connect between frontend and backend, Atlas MongoDB to store our data globally, and Thunderclient to check if the website is going in the right track. For the frontend, we also use JavaScript as the language, Render to provide public URL, CSS for the style, and React to load the web.

Challenges we ran into

The challenges that we face during this Hackathon are basically everything. The team only consist of two people. Both team member have not completed COMP2521. Chris is a first-term second-year Mechatronics Engineering student, and Rey is a third-term first-year diploma Com-Sci student. The only programming courses that we take are COMP1511 and COMP1531. We do this hackathon without knowing how to create the product. We learn while we were doing the project. We never know how to create an interface, create a public server, storing data globally, and connect the frontend and backend. The big issue that we face is having a hard time connecting the backend and the frontend. The team struggled to know a solution to input the data to the website from the backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Both of us are so proud of this project, as it is our first personal project. We did not even believe that we were able to build this website from scratch, and by knowing the most basic things for programming.

What we learned

During this project, we learn to never give up and keep learning. This is literally what it means by Just Do It. We applied to this competition by knowing the most basic thing, and in the en,d we were able to create a hopefully useful product. Other than that, this competition made both of us know a lot more regarding how to create a project. We know how to use Render, MongoDB, CSS, and React. All of them are the things that we learned while working on this project.

What's next for UniFlow - Crowd Tracker

The team believe that the UniFlow project has a bright future and a lot of room to improve. For now, the UniFlow that we create is the simplest UniFlow that is useful for student to know where is the best spot to study. However, the QR Code, getting review from people, listing the best study spot not only by the crowdness, and many more could be added to make the website even more useful for many people.

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