ConnectEd

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Inspiration

Allow state school students to have a network of people from the same area (hence background) who are going to the same university. This would allow them to easily contact people a couple of years ahead for advice and support. Having spoken to someone who left my school to go to Harrow Boarding School for Sixth Form, he described the alumni network he had available to him organised by the school. Our state-schooled team members had nothing of the sort when coming to university and no contacts. This could have been very useful looking back.

What it does

We built this app to reduce socioeconomic disadvantages and promote social equity by offering state school students similar networking opportunities to those from private and elite schools.

How we built it

A database in SQLite was linked through to a Django backend and a React frontend. We used GitHub CoPilot to reduce development time
Using Django models for Universities and Students and the API calls which linked the database to React

Challenges we ran into

Working JSON objects into the Django framework was initially tricky. We solved it by using serializers within the REST API Framework.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a working minimum viable product while most of the technology was new to 3/4 members

What we learned

How to collaborate and work in a team both technically with Git and socially with organisation and planning
Some members learned Git for the first time while others first used the Google Maps API.
Three of our members built their first web app after very limited web dev experience.
One of our members learned how to use Auth0 for the first time