Organization Core

Inspiration

Just two years ago, Victoria, Kevin, and I were rising freshmen in an unsuspecting and daunting high school environment in the midst of a global pandemic. High school, the next step of our lives was about to go down, yet we were entering it socially disconnected from our friends, teachers, and activities. It felt like we were on our own for our academics, athletics, and extracurriculars with nothing to help guide us through such an influential stage of our lives. Now as high school juniors, looking back at our stressful experiences, we have decided to come up with Organization Core, the ultimate destination for all things student organizations!

What it does

Aiming to tackle student needs in the field of organization organizations, Organization Core allows organization organizers to create profiles for their organizations, attract new members, and raise awareness for their events or fundraisers through our Organization Hub.

New students are able to explore new organizations by viewing organization profiles and connecting with them through their media links. Members are also able to see upcoming fundraisers and events that they might be interested in attending. On top of that, Organization Core has a focus on fighting climate change and increasing accessibility to organization events, so we decided to create a carpooling system where students or parents can volunteer to drive friends and other organization members to events through our Car Pool Hub. From the information filled out when signing up combined with clicking a few buttons to designate roles, members are able to receive a receipt of their driver, route, event, and additional information regarding their route. And of course, to keep track of receipts for events that students plan on going in advance, students are able to go to the Carpool Hub page to track the event receipts to the event they plan on carpooling in or driving to.

How we built it

Our website is built in html/css/js and our games are made with Unity. We set up a database and Cloud storage on Firebase so we can store data and profile pictures for multiple users as well as keep track of different snacks, organizations, and events that are posted. We also integrated Google Maps API into our code to display a map with a route determined by the carpooler list for a specific event.

Challenges we ran into

Communication, trips to the bathroom, eating enough food for energy to keep our brains working, fighting off sleep demons -> one of us slept 3 hours prior (coming from a 12 hour road trip), sleepless nights and taking absences from school to work on the project, figuring out how to use Firebase and Google Maps API as complete beginners to the platforms.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Going into MAC x Atlassian Hacks we were discouraged of our chances (being a team of only high school students compared to professional university students competing against us) and were considering dropping out, but we decided to push against the odds and attend to see what we would create. In the end, our love for hackathons persisted beyond hardship and difficulty to create a project that will live to see the day with pride. In addition, we are proud to have a working project that interacts with an online database to store information as well as integrates Google Maps.

What we learned

We learned a lot about HTML's, CSS's, and JS's more complex factors such as creating transitions upon scrolling or loading a screen, the organization and complexity of managing multiple pages, connecting data from page to page to create relevant data and useful summaries, new design tactics specifically in the artistic them of Brutalism, and commenting on code efficiently to enhance organization. We also explored how to use Firebase and Google Maps API.

What's next for Organization Core

In the future we hope to integrate more and more organizations and expand to larger communities so that socializing is not limited to students but available to people of all ages. Using marketing strategies and making partnerships, we would create another department to run social media pages and increase publicity. We may even try to gather some funds to help introduce more efficient features that are offered by other tech companies to make the user experience more smooth and enjoyable. On top of all of that, we are interested in implementing an AI aspect perhaps to help suggest new events and aid the organization leads in their creation processes. Not to mention search algorithms to best fit events and organizations to the profiles of the users coming in.