Winner of Best Beginner in NHacks VII.
Inspiration
Our team searched for an idea for the student service app for this hackathon. During this process, we were quite perplexed because of the fact that many of the ideas were already put into effect on other apps. While I was thinking about how my sister was graduating high school, I thought about how stressful it was to be a student heading into a post-secondary environment. That is when the idea of CU There was conceived. We wanted to make an organization app for students to compare what their needs were and what school they were comfortable with going to.
What it does
CU There is an app that allows users to view imperative information about popular universities. This information includes the location, tuition, and acceptance rate. CU There allows for favoriting certain universities to save them and remember them later. There is also a feature that allows you to download this data for alternative purposes.
How we built it
CU There was built using the React framework as well as the Material UI library. We used standard CSS for styling the website. First, we researched the schools’ information, as well as the logo and other design parts of the project. Then, We stored the username and the favorite schools into localStorage on the browser, and for each school, we used the Google map API to show the location of the place.
Challenges we ran into
We faced several challenges while working on CU There:
- Difficult to figure out the color palette of the website and logo
- Hard to decide on what design was best
- Didn’t know much about Material UI / React
- Time Management (minimal time to work on it)
Accomplishments that we’re proud of
- Created a fully functional website with React and MUI
- Helped students research universities to support them in getting in
- Made the website responsive both on desktop and mobile
- The first hackathon most team members have participated in
What we learned
- Learned how to use Material UI better
- Team collaboration
- Experiences with frameworks
- Responsive design
- Research skills
What’s next for CU There
We plan on adding a lot more information and more universities. We would like to reach out to universities to retrieve more information on what they search for in students. This will tremendously help students find out what they need to work on to get in.