We were inspired by the shortage of volunteers for charitable organisations and felt we could provide a solution for this by advertising and linking charities with users. We also felt like there was a gap in the services offered by universities to help their students find volunteering opportunities so wanted to have students as our initial target market but expand this with time.

Our web application connects students with volunteering opportunities by allowing them to create an account and view volunteering opportunities locally. Currently, we only have volunteering opportunities in Bath available. We hope to have universities sign up to our service for a subscription fee, which in turn would give users access to the web application.

We initially created the database using SQL to store information about our users and charities. We then created the HTML pages and joined them to the database using PHP code. This involved taking user input and adding it to the database and also outputting and printing on the page records stored in the charities database. To make the interface more user accessible, we used CSS.

Initially, we struggled with creating and exporting the database as we were using unfamiliar software, PhpMyAdmin, and the version we were using had a software bug which prevented us from exporting our database. Therefore, we had to revert back to an older version of the software which allowed us to export the database. We also struggled with the integration of the Google Maps API system with our web page but after a lot of research, we managed to learn how to do this.

We are proud of the inclusion of a Google Maps API system as this was a new skill for us all that we learnt during this hackathon. We are also proud of the integration of the database with the page and the way we retrieve data from the database and display it on the web page.

We have all deepened our knowledge and understanding of PHP, CSS and HTML and also learnt how to use new software to access this, including XAMPP and PhpMyAdmin. We have also developed our collaboration skills, working on code simultaneously and merging the changes together.

Given more development time we aim to expand out from Bath into alternative markets, add subscription service for larger companies as well as donation systems. We also would like to allow users to promote themselves on the platform as well as provide them with an optimized search algorithm for matching user and volunteering agencies