Club applications - especially at schools like Cal - have become more and more competitive in recent years. Students must keep track of numerous deadlines, attend many introductory events, submit application materials, and constantly stress to find clubs that best fit their future career goals amongst a huge student body.

ClubScout centralizes and simplifies the club application season for both students and clubs. From a student point of view, ClubScout helps efficiently apply to clubs by centralizing all application questions and important dates. It also allows students to discover new clubs based on their interests and majors by using keyword searches. From a club point of view, ClubScout allows club officers to post information and review applications in a more organized system than stray Google Forms.

After lots of brainstorming and research, we decided to work simultaneously on frontend and backend. We started designing the user interface using Figma, making sure the platform would be accessible to everyone. Based on our UI/UX design concept, we created two databases: one to store student user information and another for club information. Finally, we completed the Swift code for our app in Xcode based on our UI/UX design. Our team also worked on coding features beyond Figma's capabilities, such as searching through lists and user input.

Because none of our team had any experience with app development or building and accessing databases prior to CalHacks, a majority of our time was spent figuring out how to bring our ideas to life. Over the past twenty-four hours, we have watched endless YouTube videos, read multiple online tutorials, and slept a collective five hours in an attempt to code ClubScouts using Swift and Figma, neither of which we had seen before.

We have two goals for ClubScouts’ future. One: utilize information in the database to personalize the app experience for users and clubs. For example, students will eventually be able to add clubs to their "Applying To" list and add these deadlines to their calendar. Two: work on Google Authentication and Firebase. Students will be able to manage their accounts using their school emails and IDs. After all, ClubScouts was made for students by students.

We still have a long way to go in designing and testing ClubScouts, but we're proud of the progress we made during CalHacks. Our team came into CalHacks unfamiliar with mobile app design, but we'll leave more confidence in our ability to code and our ability to innovate.
## Inspiration: Deciding whether to join a student organization or going to their events without any information about how enjoyable the experience is can be difficult at an institution! We wanted to bring reviews to clubs so that you feel comfortable about where you spend your time!

## What it does:

* ClubHub allows current, past, and prospective members of a club rate the club on a scale and leave reviews about their experiences with an organization.

The organization's ratings are publicly available for all people that are within and outside of the University. All clubs are considered subsidiaries of the University they have chosen to be registered under, and will be listed within the institutions page.

## How we built it

* The app was completely built with Retool initially, and will be developed further with Swift/SiwfUI along with Firebase, and Flutter for the iOS and Android versions of the application

## Challenges we ran into

* Backend data access
* Creating web scraping scripts to gather information about already existing clubs at an institution
* APIs for each university

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

* Creating an Access Control System that allows organization owners to edit details about the club, without being able to edit any reviews that keep the club reviews authentic
* Creating a very seamless front-end interface with Navigation controls that allows user for each page of the application

## What we learned

* Pivoting from an idea is important when creating an application since there are some aspects and API integrations that are very difficult to implement

## What's next for ClubHub

* We are still in the testing phase, and we want to make the backend database more efficient
* Eventually we want to scale the application, so that it can reach people and universities across the Nation
## Why We Created **Here**

As college students, one question that we catch ourselves asking over and over again is – “Where are you studying today?” One of the most popular ways for students to coordinate is through texting. But messaging people individually can be time consuming and awkward for both the inviter and the invitee—reaching out can be scary, but turning down an invitation can be simply impolite. Similarly, group chats are designed to be a channel of communication, and as a result, a message about studying at a cafe two hours from now could easily be drowned out by other discussions or met with an awkward silence.

Just as Instagram simplified casual photo sharing from tedious group-chatting through stories, we aim to simplify casual event coordination. Imagine being able to efficiently notify anyone from your closest friends to lecture buddies about what you’re doing—on your own schedule.

Fundamentally, **Here** is an app that enables you to quickly notify either custom groups or general lists of friends of where you will be, what you will be doing, and how long you will be there for. These events can be anything from an open-invite work session at Bass Library to a casual dining hall lunch with your philosophy professor. It’s the perfect dynamic social calendar to fit your lifestyle.

Groups are customizable, allowing you to organize your many distinct social groups. These may be your housemates, Friday board-game night group, fellow computer science majors, or even a mixture of them all. Rather than having exclusive group chat plans, **Here** allows for more flexibility to combine your various social spheres, casually and conveniently forming and strengthening connections.

## What it does

**Here** facilitates low-stakes event invites between users who can send their location to specific groups of friends or a general list of everyone they know. Similar to how Instagram lowered the pressure involved in photo sharing, **Here** makes location and event sharing casual and convenient.

## How we built it

UI/UX Design: Developed high fidelity mockups on Figma to follow a minimal and efficient design system. Thought through user flows and spoke with other students to better understand needed functionality.

Frontend: Our app is built on React Native and Expo.

Backend: We created a database schema and set up in Google Firebase. Our backend is built on Express.js.

All team members contributed code!

## Challenges

Our team consists of half first years and half sophomores. Additionally, the majority of us have never developed a mobile app or used these frameworks. As a result, the learning curve was steep, but eventually everyone became comfortable with their specialties and contributed significant work that led to the development of a functional app from scratch.

Our idea also addresses a simple problem which can conversely be one of the most difficult to solve. We needed to spend a significant amount of time understanding why this problem has not been fully addressed with our current technology and how to uniquely position **Here** to have real change.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of how developed our app is currently, with a fully working database and custom frontend that we saw transformed from just Figma mockups to an interactive app. It was also eye opening to be able to speak with other students about our app and understand what direction this app can go into.

## What we learned

Creating a mobile app from scratch—from designing it to getting it pitch ready in 36 hours—forced all of us to accelerate our coding skills and learn to coordinate together on different parts of the app (whether that is dealing with merge conflicts or creating a system to most efficiently use each other’s strengths).

## What's next for **Here**

One of **Here’s** greatest strengths is the universality of its usage. After helping connect students with students, **Here** can then be turned towards universities to form a direct channel with their students. **Here** can provide educational institutions with the tools to foster intimate relations that spring from small, casual events. In a poll of more than sixty university students across the country, most students rarely checked their campus events pages, instead planning their calendars in accordance with what their friends are up to. With **Here**, universities will be able to more directly plug into those smaller social calendars to generate greater visibility over their own events and curate notifications more effectively for the students they want to target. Looking at the wider timeline, **Here** is perfectly placed at the revival of small-scale interactions after two years of meticulously planned agendas, allowing friends who have not seen each other in a while casually, conveniently reconnect.

The whole team plans to continue to build and develop this app. We have become dedicated to the idea over these last 36 hours and are determined to see just how far we can take **Here**!