Description as a Tweet:

UMass Study Spots (USS) is a mobile app to help you find an empty space on campus with a chalk/whiteboard. USS shows you the schedules of nearby classrooms and tells you (1) how long the empty classrooms will be empty and (2) how long until an in-use classroom is available.

Inspiration:

When we want to work on homework individually or with friends, we find it best to work in a somewhat private place with a whiteboard. We noticed that all the unused classrooms on campus exactly fit this description, but there isn't a nice way to figure out which classrooms are empty (except for manually visiting them). UMass Study Spots is our giving everyone the ability to find a great place to work.

What it does:

This project gives users access to the schedules of each classroom in every building on campus. This information is accessible in a mobile application to let students know (1) how long an empty classroom will be empty for and (2) how long until an in-use classroom will be available.

How we built it:

We wrote a Python script to capture course meeting information from Spire (which can be accessed publicly) and compile it all into a SQLite database.

We then created a mobile application with React Native with a map of campus to help find nearby buildings. Once a nearby building is selected, we query the SQLite database to obtain schedule for each classroom in that building, which helps determine which classrooms are empty and for how long.

Technologies we used:

HTML/CSS
Javascript
React
SQL
Python

Challenges we ran into:

We both had little experience with React Native, so we faced challenges a few learning React Native-specific tasks such as navigation between screens, integration with SQLite databases, and using Maps.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

We are impressed at how we able to build this app in such a short amount of time. We are quite proud of how decent the UI looks considering that we are both CS people with 0 UX experience.

What we've learned:

We learned how easy it can be to build a good-looking app from "scratch" using React Native and several libraries.

What's next:

There's still a few pieces missing such as first-class, well-tested support for Android, a dark mode, and definitely a lot of code cleanup.

Built with:

We built the UMass Study Spots mobile application using React Native and Expo. Inside the app, we used a SQLite database to store and query class meeting information.

UMass Study Spots