CampusKit is a student-to-student equipment rental platform built for college campuses.

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

I built CampusKit, a student-focused platform that helps students rent and share college equipment with each other.

The idea came from a common problem on campus: students often need academic equipment for a limited period of time, but buying something they may only use for a semester can be expensive.

At the same time, other students may already own the same equipment and no longer use it regularly.

CampusKit connects these two groups:

• Students who need equipment can find and rent it.
• Students who own unused equipment can list it and rent it out.
• Students can discover available equipment and manage their rentals through one platform.

The goal is simple:

Instead of every student buying the same equipment, students can share what they already have.

I built CampusKit with students in mind, especially those who want a more affordable way to access college equipment without purchasing everything themselves.

Demo

Live Link:

[https://campuskit.nabinbera.in]

I haven't created a separate video demo for this submission.

Code

GitHub Repository:

[https://github.com/NabinDevX/CampusKit]

The complete source code and project implementation are available in the repository.

How I Built It

CampusKit was built as a full-stack student-to-student rental platform, with AI used specifically to help estimate reasonable rental prices for college equipment.

I used Google Antigravity and GitHub Copilot during development to assist with implementing the application, debugging, and iterating on the project.

For the AI-powered rental price prediction feature, I used Gemma, Google's open model family. The model takes information such as the equipment type, estimated original value, rental duration, and other relevant factors to generate a suggested rental price.

The AI is used as a recommendation layer rather than the source of truth. The final rental price can still be reviewed and adjusted by the equipment owner.

I chose an open model for this part of CampusKit because it gives the project more flexibility than building the feature entirely around a closed AI model. Developers can experiment with, adapt, and build on open models while keeping the AI component focused on a specific campus use case.

The rest of the application handles the core rental workflow, including equipment listings, availability, rental requests, and user interactions.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open innovation matters because CampusKit is designed for a community where the needs can vary from one college to another.

An open approach allows other students and developers to inspect the project, modify it, contribute improvements, and adapt it to their own campus.

Using open-source AI also makes experimentation more accessible. Instead of making the project completely dependent on a closed AI API, developers can work with open models and tools and potentially run or customize them according to their requirements.

For CampusKit, this fits naturally with the idea behind the project itself:

Students should be able to share resources instead of everyone having to buy the same things.

Open-source software follows a similar principle: instead of everyone building everything from scratch, developers can share, reuse, improve, and build on each other's work.