Description as a Tweet:

Ensures that our resources are used appropriately

Inspiration:

Every day, a lot of paper is being wasted on campus in the libraries. One of 5 students on campus prints more than what is required which is directly or indirectly affecting our environment. So, in order to ensure that UMass Students use their resources appropriately, we came up with an analysis of each individual's Paper Usage.

What it does:

Our Project essentially aims at reducing Paper Usage in the libraries on Campus. We provide statistics of their paper usage throughout the year where they are able to track it, given a ranking and points(to gain coupons, eventually) according to the rank. Overall, this results in the students competing to decrease the Paper Usage.

How we built it:

We used HTML CSS, JavaScript, JAVA, MongoDB, Compass to build this.

We initially planned on creating a mobile app. This would've given us a lot of new knowledge in the mobile development space. However, it seemed that creating a website was the fastest and most efficient method of executing the application in this time frame. Not all team members had access to Xcode which would've made collaboration difficult.

After pivoting towards web development, we immediately started looking into HTML/CSS, and back end tools for the database. We had a great start to a MongoDB database and creating user accounts and Shells for us. Creating/editing a fundraiser, and creating/editing a database was fun but all the challenges were in the linking.

Once it was linked to Java, we could build the front end of our app.

Technologies we used:

HTML/CSS
Javascript
Java
Misc

Challenges we ran into:

Understanding APIs and how they work together, in particular using the MongoDB Database which proved to be a big challenge! None of us were familiar with using Databases. We had to spend many hours doing research and fixing bugs to be able to use mongoDB the best we could. We would also like to give a shout-out to our Mentor Ruchi for all her help!

Accomplishments we're proud of:

As a team of coders, we are proud of our functional front end in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as well as our backend in Java. We are also proud of the knowledge we gained about MongoDB and database creation and management. We worked very hard on this project. We are very proud of learning new skills such as MongoDB, using APIs. We all had mixed skill levels and we worked well as a team supporting and teaching each other.

What we've learned:

We spent most of our time learning about Databases, MongoDB Shell as well as user login with MongoDB which was a completely new tool that none of us were familiar with.

What's next:

As well as sprucing up the look of our website, we would like to implement more functionality such as being able to predict your paper usage for the future months, create multiple fundraisers/donating options on our website to make it more effective. Our other future ideas for Paper Usage Report are to expand it into a College-wide portal, Categorizing individual students into their respective Colleges, and their respective Class years. In this way, they are given an opportunity to increase their chances of earning the maximum points. They will be offered certain coupons if they do achieve that criteria. This brings economic growth for both the College and the students at the same time benefitting our Environment.

Built with:

We built it with HTML, CSS, MongoDB, Eclipse IDE

Prizes we're going for:

Best Web App
Best STEM Hack
Best Finance Hack
Funniest Hack
Best use of MongoDB Atlas

Paper Usage Report