UCF - Spring 2020
UCF has one of the largest student populations in the nation. With more than 600 Registered Student Organizations (RSOs), it should be trivial to find a group of like-minded students to make college easier and more fun. However, as UCF students, we know this to be far from the truth.
Between UCF's host of websites, information platforms, and mobile app – learning the who-what-when-where of RSOs, classes, professors, and ideas can be challenging to freshman and veteran students alike.
In our time at UCF, we (and many others) have had difficulty discovering "study-buddies," clubs, and information. To address these challenges, we're developing UKnight, an Android application.
Specifically, UKnight will help students:
- Find other students that share similar classes and professors.
- Discover like-minded students in courses and RSOs.
- Uncover seemingly hidden-away information.
UKnight will achieve this by being a student companion with mild social media components to help students during their university journey. We aim to do this by:
- Finding and connecting students who share similar courses, interests, and goals through their semesterly course schedule, expressed degree program, and interests.
- Connecting the UCF calendar and other known calendar sources into a centralized location that recommends events to attend.
- Integrating somewhat known information, like locations that apply student discounts, have periodic markdowns, needed academic forms, and the like.
Generally, a keen observation is that all the information we aim to provide already exists and can be found, but oftentimes is rather dispersed. While this doesn't make it impossible to find, it can be rather challenging to discover without pointed searching and queries. UKnight strives to aggregate and present this information in a manner that requires minimal exertion on behalf of the student.
The university experience is one that is often enhanced by forming connections over shared coursework, interests, and goals – yet many of the tools UCF "provides" to achieve these appear to fail a significant number of students. UKnight's goal is to help build these connections and cultivate student's experience at UCF, for the better.
- Jonathan Rohrback (@JRohrback13)
- Blake Barr (@BlakelyBarr)
- Chloë Geller (@h3mi0n3)
- Andrew Borg (@Andrew-borg)