Introducing KIDE → The KIIT Ultimate Guide
KIDE is an open-source project by some of the students of KIIT University that will help other KIITians to understand KIIT in a better way.
KIIT University is a huge campus spread in the area of approximately 700 acres and consists of 23 schools for studying in different courses and curriculums. Apart from this, there are a lot more things to explore here. Almost 60,000 students study on the campus. When students come into this kingdom, they feel lost in this beautiful maze. So, here’s a vision that can help them to understand KIIT in a better way.
KIDE, as a platform, intends to serve all that a student might need in their day to day student life. Features like attendance, timetable, end to end classroom experience, reminders for classes, links to online classes of zoom and GMeet, SAP SLcM integration, Full university 3D Map with landmarks and directions, student profile, and more such features which will make the student experience as simple as attending college on your bed.
How this all started — February 2020?
Well, it was just a college project from the tools & technologies Lab of KIIT University initially under our esteemed professor and friend Mr. Kumar Devdutta. The initial goal was to make a tour guide for visitors and KIITians but as we started brainstorming with the ideas, we came across a lot of things and our vision got expanded.
What do we do & think?
We are trying to build a personalized end-to-end digital platform for all the KIITians which will help them to explore KIIT in a better way and get the latest updates related to KIIT. The platform KIDE will help them to do so. It’s an integrated platform that consists of a lot of features and facilities that will make the life of a KIITian easier and interesting.
Right now we are progressively building an application for the usage of KIITians and other visitors. But, in the near future, there are no limitations on features and functionalities. We are going to have a lot of things on the platform and that will help the visitors and KIITians to understand the university in a better and digitized way. The platform will give an end-to-end experience to the students and the visitors making it “One app for everything to encompass our ambitions”.
Journey so far
With the vision to help the visitors & KIITians and create a digitized platform, we started off by building the application in a progressive approach. After getting an idea of how it will work and a lot of sessions of brainstorming, we came up with an idea to build a tour guide for the campus.
The Khelo India Recognition
The app got its first recognition during the inaugural season of Khelo India University Games, 2020. The app was predominantly used by the students and visitors, alongside the official Khelo India app, for which the KIDE App was a demo and an active part of the official app development. The app was given credit and appreciation by Mr. Satya Narayan Meena, Jt. CEO, Khelo India University Games.
The KFC — KIIT Flutter Community
After the app got its recognition and we were set to fly, we thought of establishing an open-source community of developers who are interested in contributing to KIDE. So, we came up with an open-source organization named KFC (KIIT Flutter Community). After the virtual inauguration, it got viral and people started joining the vision. The main motto of this establishment was to create awareness among the developers for opensource contributions.
A Platform by students, for students, of students
KFC helped us to introduce some awesome developers who were willing to contribute to the vision and make things possible. After all these things in place, we transformed the idea and vision to a platform by the Students, for the students, and of the students. Now having said that, we enhanced the application to a greater extent after getting contributions from the developers.
The Hacktoberfest 2020
Hacktoberfest is a global event organized by DigitalOcean to promote and celebrate the opensource contributions in the month of October. This month, the developers, students, learners, and other opensource enthusiasts contribute to the opensource projects to make them better. As we are opensource, we are also participating in the fest and we are open to contributions to our repository.
The Tech Stack
The primary tech stack for the platform is:
1. A primary Flutter app.
2. A React app for Admin Control Panel.
3. Firebase for Auth and Cloud Firestore for Data
4. Flask API for SAP Scraping.
What next?
As we are having a great team that is always ready to contribute to the mission, we are getting more and more confident about the vision. We are going to have a great single-platform for all the students and visitors who want to explore KIIT in a better way.
Want to join us?
As we are having a great vision and we are willing to make that possible in the near future, we are looking forward to contributions and collaborations here. If you are interested in the idea or you’re having something really cool that can help us to grow better, then feel free to contact us at kide.kiit@gmail.com.
