This January I took part in the HackED 2021, Alberta’s Largest Student Run Hackathon.
The hackathon was for 24 hours and I worked in a team of 4 with Tanyaradzwa Gozhora, Abeer Waheed and David Jacinth.
It is evident that due to online learning, university students are unable to connect with their peers in their classes as much. This is why my friends and I decided to design
a website whereby UAlberta students can fill in their discord usernames and the courses they are taking. Then they will be mathched with the top 5 students taking similar courses as them and they shall be granted their discord handles. This way students in similar classes can make new friends online.
For this project we used HTML, CSS and Javascript for the frontend and NodeJS for the backend and MongoDB to handle the database. We had to come up with an algorithm that can match a student with 5 others instantly when they fill in the form. The search and matching was optimized by creating MongoDB indexes and the form to be filled was designed in a way that students can add upto 6 courses. We used Google Authentication to ensure that only students with ualberta email addresses can signup and fill the form.
- The project details can be viewed at Devpost
- The full code can be found at GitHub
- The website is launched and you can view it at Unify
Furthermore, we plan to extend this website such that it can work for all universities in Canada.
