Before we register for courses most of us read the course descriptions but the descriptions are meant to persuade us to sign-up and take the course. They don’t give a true idea of the course. Well, you might look for people who have taken the course you’re looking to register for but that takes time and energy. It’s 2020, we don’t want to have to crowdsource course reviews ourselves. We want to be able to search on google and see what others have to say about the course we’re looking at like when we look at the reviews for an item being sold on ebay before we actually buy the item. Following this thought we decided to build a course review app.
What it does-
We wanted to build a web app that would allow students to look at crowdsourced reviews of courses from multiple colleges and schools to get a better idea of what the courses are like. Our hope was to make it easier to find out about the courses you want or need to take from other students which would cut down on dissatisfaction with classes and allow students to know what they are getting into. Course Review allows users to find courses they have taken and post reviews as well as search for courses they are interested in taking and read the reviews. There are different colleges to search from and then the courses from those colleges are listed and students can read/post reviews anonymously.
How we built it-
Once we figured out what we wanted our app to do we set up a github repo and got started. Our front-end was written using React and for our backend we relied on Firebase since it was faster and more reliable than setting up our own db and authentication system. We set up our project and used the firebase sdk as well as using a spam service that was built using nodeJS. We didn’t have much experience using firebase but we figured it out as we went along and we are proud of what we were able to accomplish in 36 hours.
Challenges we ran into-
We had some issues trying to get the data from Firebase. None of us had worked with Firebase before so we were figuring it out as we went along. It was also tricky getting the spam service to work but we found a spam service using node.js that made it easier to implement a spam blocker.
Accomplishments that we're proud of-
Being able to communicate between our front-end and backend. Getting firebase to work and creating a working prototype for our web app.
What we learned-
We learned how to use Firebase Firestore for our database and read and write our data from it. As well as learning how to program in react and use node.js.
What's next for Course Review-
The web app we created is just a small version of what it could be with more development time. Some possible improvements would be crowdsourcing different college names and their available courses so we aren’t entering it manually, giving users the ability to rate the difficulty of the course, as well as creating filters for the search to find courses based on popularity, difficulty, subject matter, etc and finally allowing users to create a course builder where they can add the courses they like to a cart so when it comes time to sign-up and register for courses they are prepared. Our app would be very useful and it can be easily monetized by adding ads to the site as well as creating different user subscriptions. Like having a free subscription where users can read reviews and post reviews but they can only do it for a few courses. Then we can have a monthly/yearly subscription where users can post and read as many reviews as they would like, create a username so they are no longer a random user as well as having access to the course builder where they compile their favorite courses and refer to them for later use. We worked hard on our course review app and we hope that you find it interesting!
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