As first-year students at UWaterloo, we (and many alike) have struggled to fully adjust. Finding unique study spots and places to eat around campus is one of the biggest problems. Could you imagine going to the RCH basement and thinking that’s the best Waterloo has to offer? We hope everyone avoids this completely real situation! Anyhow, we want to tackle this issue by creating a web application that provides all this useful information, similar to Yelp but on a smaller, intimate scale. Not only is this beneficial to incoming students, but it also helps students who are in their upper years. They have the opportunity to explore new places all over the campus, and potentially even find a new favourite!
Home page:
Reviews page:
The project establishes a web application that provides students with a general ranking of spots all around campus, this includes restaurants, coffee shops, study areas and anything else students would like to recommend. Our app will allow users to add suggested locations and give ratings/reviews on all the places. This helps students to easily choose and compare places available to them and what they would prefer, rating may include noise level, size, cleanliness and many more tailored for students and made by students. This can be additionally improved to provide live updates on how crowded each location is, or even specific wait times. Students will be able to input their ideas as comments and ratings, which includes not only the libraries but also other buildings and their specific location.
This project is unique to the Waterloo student community, no other platform provides ratings for general student-life uses, authentic to past student experiences. This project can be implemented for other universities if the scale was to increase, it can be compared to UWFlow which was specifically made for Waterloo students, while Rate My Professors are for all high-education institutions.
A web application would be very suitable to take on for this project idea. We are looking forward to learning the full process of starting with an idea, designing a prototype and implementing the final product. We will use Figma to design the UI of the app. Our team is hoping to become comfortable and familiar with web app technologies. In particular, we are looking into using ReactJS for the frontend of the website and potentially having a backend implemented with ExpressJS and MongoDB if we want to keep track of ratings for different places, handle user authentication or a map feature for the study/food locations. The priority would definitely be to finish designing on Figma and begin working on the frontend and implement as many technical features as we can!