ClubHub
The Problem
Often times, students miss club activities because they are not aware of which clubs exist on campus. There is no easily accessible list of clubs besides the club fair, which only comes once a semester and is congested with students. What's more, not every club is represented at the club fair, and not every club has a chance to present to everyone interested because the club fair is too short. Also, it can be difficult for club members to know the whereabouts of meetings because different clubs utilize different forms of communication, making it inconvenient for students to keep track of their meetings. Students have to bounce back and forth between apps and messages from different clubs’ officers. With the significant amount of stress already put on students inside the classroom, our goal is to make participating in a club an enjoyable extracurricular experience and eliminate the need to manage clubs on top of schoolwork.
Our Solution
We developed ClubHub, a mobile phone application, to solve our problem. We designed the app to improve the organization and management of clubs at schools and to benefit our main audience. We targeted this product toward students who partake in extracurricular activities in an attempt to simplify their lives. Beginning with the design of the app, we chose to use the React Native framework provided by Facebook, which facilitates application development in languages like Javascript and CSS that would otherwise only be available for websites. We used Google’s Firebase to store information about each club and login data for accounts.
Users of our app have the option to sign in with an email and password and can register for clubs via the app. They can also enable notifications for club meetings, which directly addresses our problem statement. If users prefer not to have notifications, they can view a calendar that displays all meetings. We utilized Cloud 9 for coding and used Github to aggregate our code and maximize our collaborative efficiency.
Now that the first version of our app is finished, we are in the process of listing it on the Google Play store. Once students download the app, they can navigate to the app’s main page, “My Clubs,” and will be able to view a compilation of all clubs that they have joined. If users would like to register for new clubs, they can view a list from the “Browse Clubs” page, which offers the ability for users to request permission to join clubs hosted by other members. This gives students the opportunity the view clubs outside of the club fair, which 94% of students said they wanted. Our app did not cost anything to design, and it has the potential to reach thousands of students, so it may be an attractive investment for venture capitalists once it grows. Some improvements that could be made on the current product could be the utilization of a calendar feature to better display the upcoming events that users have for their clubs. A fully-functioning search bar may also be incorporated in the Browse Clubs page to help the user navigate more effectively to search for clubs that interest them.
