CollBoard.com

Inspiration

Our team has been doing online education apps for a pretty long time. Almost three years, we started an online education company with math textbooks.

When the crisis appears, and the Czech government closes the schools, we have started thinking about how to help teachers with transition to online education.

We have figured out that there are a lot of tools, but there is no extremely simple web whiteboard.

What it does

It is just a whiteboard, and you can immediately start to draw on it. There is no need for any registration or forgoing through complicated functionalities.

How we built it

We have developed an app around three critical technologies:

1) TypeScript, which checks the consistency and helps us to keep the code in high quality.

2) To render all the things, we are using a combination of React and SVG instead of canvas, which is used by market competition products.

3) To transfer and synchronize drawings between the user's we are using Socket.io (WebSockets).

Challenges we ran into

We ave two major challenges: 1) How to build a good server infrastructure for keeping many and many of thousands active, alive connective sockets. 2) The quick propagation to the teachers and schools.

What's next for CollBoard.com

We are creating a system of individual plug-ins for particular subjects. For example, a plug-in for advanced math, chemistry, biology, arts, and so on. If you have an idea for a plug-in or you want to help us with building the new plug-ins, please contact me at [email protected].