Casu | Devpost

Chosen theme and problem statement

Giving back, Question 1

Inspiration

-- The members of Casu come from diverse educational backgrounds, and we’ve all been fortunate to study in well-structured, resourceful academic environments. However, with those experiences comes a greater awareness of the inequality that plagues our society, and more specifically, our education system. Some of our team members are volunteer tutors and therefore have first-hand insight into the academic barriers many underprivileged students face. As such, it was an appropriate juncture to create a product that allowed students like ourselves to do their part in leveling the playing field, so that we can all have brighter futures to look forward to.

What it does

CasaTutor is a matchmaking web platform that connects older, more experienced students with their juniors around Singapore. Allowing users (both prospective tutors and tutees) to narrow their searches based on subject, syllabus, and academic level, the platform is aimed at developing a tuition ecosystem that is underpinned not by monetary transactions but the equally beneficial exchange of experience and knowledge.

How does your hack answer the problem statement

We developed our hack to act as a direct response to the problem statement, by offering an accessible and sustainable volunteering opportunity to students who want such opportunities.

How we built it

The application was built with these main technologies:

Bootstrap
CSS
JS

We chose these low-tech alternatives as they suited the timeframe of the project, and allowed us to implement features as quickly as possible.

Challenges we ran into

A main challenge we ran into was organization. Given the hectic schedule of the project and the amount of boilerplate code that needed to be written, things got out of hand quickly. Thankfully, we were able to take a step back and refactor our code by the end.