We noticed many of our peers struggle to get into a deep focus while studying in a big noisy city such as Toronto. We wanted to create an inclusive service that encourages collaboration by studying in groups, a service that was easy to use and showed users the different locations they could go to study.
Stroom is a web application that allows user's to create and host study sessions. Created with the MERN tech stack (without React), our application stores data in a MongoDB database as well as authenticate user logins all done through the use of MongoDB Atlas, powered by Node.js and Express.js. In addition to this our application integrates the Google Maps APIs to show nearby libraries, colleges, and universities. Our application encourages students get involved in the inclusive and racially diverse environment that is the big city, by making the most out of all the different studying facilities.
Front-end: HTML/CSS, Javascript, Bootstrap, Express.js Back-end: Google API, MongoDB Compass/Atlas, Javascript, Node.js, Mongoose, Git and GitHub
The biggest challenge we ran into was trying to save our data on the MongoDB Compass/Atlas database as we weren’t very familiar with utilizing MongoDB for creation of web applications in such a short time. Another challenge we ran into was working with so many different frameworks and libraries as we aren't the most skilled or knowledgeable in a lot of them but still put in our best efforts to create the best web application that we can.
We are proud of our integration of such frameworks and libraries such as Google API, Node.js, and MongoDB as we had little to no experience working with them. Nonetheless, we are proud that we challenged ourselves to step outside our comfort zones and try new skills that we weren’t familiar with.
We learned a lot of technical skills, such as integrating databases and applying various frameworks and libraries. We also learned how to manage our time throughout the 24 hour hackathon, by breaking down components of the project into smaller manageable pieces. This all contributed to us ending up with our final product which we are satisfied with.
We are continuing to be creative and unafraid to step outside our comfort zone to try something new. In the future, we plan on implementing a user profile and a searching network where users are able to find their ideal studying space with similar individuals by utilizing our tags system. These were features we had originally planned to include in our final product but couldn't implement in time due to the limited time we had. Our priority was the functionality of the app rather than smaller details such as filtering and searching.