AttendAlert

Current Teacher Login Page
A future optimisation
Page for uploading questions
Quiz Screen

Inspiration

It has been difficult for some students to transition from an in-person to a virtual classroom. With this comes the additional disadvantage of reduced attention span with studies saying that there is a decline in student's attention 10–15 min into lectures. This greatly reduces the effectiveness of these online lectures and affects students adversely during examinations as their retention power decreases. As students, we are facing the same issue and have taken this initiative to combat this in our way. Similarly, teachers may also know the attentiveness of the student and ask questions accordingly.

What it does

AttendAlert basically addresses the lessened attention of students during online lectures mostly due to lack and concentration and multitasking. It is a student friendly initiative to help them learn and grasp better in these circumstances.

It has a portal for teachers where they can login and upload questions corresponding to the lecture material to be discussed in the class.
The teachers can set the time when they wish to ask a certain question.
The students have a separate app where they see all these questions and answer them as they are asked. The ideal time-gap to judge a student’s attention between the discussed material and the question should be 10-15 minutes.
This app can ideally be used for judging attendance of a student during the online lecture and measure the attention span at the same time.

How we built it

AttendAlert is a mobile app for students built using Flutter. Flutter is a cross platform development framework which allows us to design apps for both android and iOS with just one codebase. The teacher’s login and questions upload portal is designed using Django. Django is a Python-based free and open-source web framework that follows the model-template views architectural pattern.

Challenges we ran into

As none of us was well-versed in the frameworks, we faced multiple challenges in learning them using the right resources. We also took a lot of time in debugging the code and finding the right features for the idea in our mind.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to think of a unique idea and implement it from scratch in these 24 hours given. We were able to incorporate most of the features we aimed for.

What we learned

We learnt how to brainstorm in a particular area and support our arguments with existing research work. We also learnt to use two new frameworks - Django and Flutter and many of their features to build the app. Apart from this, we learnt time management and team spirit.

What's next for AttendAlert

Our future steps are :

Building a bot that can input live audio from the online class and then using NLP to build a script from that. This could then be used to frame automated questions and reduce the burden of the teacher.
We plan to measure the attention span of students and maintain a database for the same. This could then help in judging their emotional wellness and treating them accordingly, that is linking the psychological and academic aspects.