Four Valencia High School students spent their summer coding a website called Club Link, where clubs are available to other Valencia students at the click of a button.
Seniors Daniel Huiza, 17, Bill Scott, 17, Pranav Basnet, 17, and Evan Kang, 17, initially had the idea in spring of their junior year and spent months building their project. Initially wanting it to be an app, but with many obstacles in the process, the students chose to create a website with TypeScript, HTML and CSS, among other languages.
“The purpose of the project is to increase the accessibility of information about clubs on campus geared toward people’s interests,” said Huiza.
According to Huiza, there are a multitude of clubs, but there isn’t enough time to go around and explore.
“To have that information accessible, and you can just pull up the website, it’s so much easier,” Huiza said.
Basnet initially had the idea when he was a sophomore in high school, when he missed Club Day.
“Clubs are set up with posters in the quad, and then students during brunch come around and can learn about all of the clubs,” Basnet said. “Before we made our app, it was the only time you could find out about clubs. In my sophomore year, I was actually absent that day, so I didn’t know about any clubs at all.”
The students divided up the work, and Kang and Basnet worked closely with creating a form accessible for students to submit information.
“I was working pretty closely with Pranav with the back-end stuff because a pretty vital part of our website is the form where clubs submit all their information,” Kang said. “We had to work around the clock to find a way to connect our website to a database, and we eventually got it.”
With intentions of studying computer science in the future, the friends realized how fun it would be to start something that they could not only put on their resumes, but also leave a lasting impression on Valencia.
“We love programming, and we thought it would be a fun project,” Huiza said. “We just wanted to make our own thing. As students, we feel that we understand our peers in a way that we can help them.”
As the students are trying to grow their database and spread the word, this project is not the only one that has been created for the purpose of academia.
“One of the other projects we also have been working on this summer is an [AI] model that has been specifically trained on school textbooks, called Campus Connected,” Basnet said. “I combined it with my project that I created last year, which was a forum where students could connect with verified tutors. So now, whenever students input a question to the forum, the chat bot will already reply, and give all the resources as well.”
