The Robotics & AI Lab is a space where students of any program can explore their ideas and use its expert-grade guidance and resources to make innovation real. One of the many student-run clubs at IE University has particularly close ties with the Lab.
Five members of the IE Robotics & AI Club wanted not only to spread the word about the Lab and the club’s work, but to also attract new members and pass on their passion, sharing their love of these exciting, groundbreaking disciplines with a global audience.
A platform for the whole club
Daniel, Jose, Zaid, Kye and Yousef saw an opportunity to showcase and support the IE Robotics & AI Club’s activities. To acc omplish this, they realized the club would benefit considerably from having its own, dedicated website. So they started laying the groundwork to create a platform that wouldn’t just show off club members’ projects and real-world achievements, but also provide descriptions and updates on ongoing research initiatives, educational resources on robotics and AI and a calendar of club events and activities. The website would even feature its own blog where site visitors could access the latest news and industry insights.
As peers in the same program, their shared interests but diverse skills made it easier to strike an expert balance between technical excellence on the back end and attractive, user-friendly design on the front end. The result is an innovative website that delivers wide functionality wrapped in a clean design.
Solutions chosen
The team incorporated different software solutions for the very different elements of the website project. On the front end, comprising the graphics, layout and user interface, they leveraged the capabilities of Astro to emphasize performance, maintainability and user-friendliness.
For the back end, which involves everything the website uses unseen to function, such as databases, application programming interfaces and so on, they turned to Astro once again, along with GitHub, Docker, Express and MongoDB. And when it was time to work, the team chose traditional methods for collaborating on software development and agile methodologies to organize the workload and themselves.
Takeaways and big plans
Daniel, Jose, Zaid, Kye and Yousef describe the website project experience as “enriching,” particularly in advancing their general web development skills and corresponding expertise with Astro for front-end design. They also honed their project management skills and enhanced their understanding of how to bring complex topics like robotics and AI to a broad audience in an engaging way.
They’ve also gained a deeper appreciation for the intersection of web technology and innovative fields like robotics and AI while deepening their own technical abilities. And they have plans to leverage these new competencies to take the platform even further: the team hopes to boost the already strong connection between the Robotics & AI Lab and the IE Robotics & AI Club by integrating Internet of Things technology to increase the website’s interactive functionality.
For now, they’re already working on bringing knowledge-sharing to the platform, with longer-term plans to add a virtual assistant. We’ll be keeping a close eye on where they take the platform—and where the project takes them.
