EduFront

The bridge between students, educators and education

Comment 2

Inspiration

As there was no theme to this competition, we decided to ask around what the people in our community primarily considered as the prevalent issues in the society. We conducted a survey of sample size 60, which included students and adults from various professions. We concluded that "Education" was the major area that we needed to focus on. Furthermore, its a topic that strongly affects all of us as high school students. The screenshot of the survey results has been attached. As high school students, we've always found great difficulty in finding the correct resources or getting informed about events on time. There were numerous missed opportunities due to ineffective communication which led to us choosing this as our theme for the Hackathon. Under education, we decided to look into a common platform that would help students like us manage school work efficiently and smartly. As Computer Science students, we too believe and agree with Google's mission statement: To use technology to change the world into a better place.

What it does

It is an application that brings together all the students from our school, and gives them access to notes, books and resources that can help them sail through school. Our app includes a login-registration system, which can be linked to the school database, through the students' NRIC/FIN number. Here are some of the features of our application: 1) School Announcements: This feature allows registered students to send announcements and alerts for upcoming school events in the form of push notifications. The message is sent and displayed along with the student's registered username. An effective method of delivering crucial information to the entire cohort, and giving everyone an opportunity to participate. Effective communication achieved. 2) Checklist: This is a feature that allows the student to mark important events on the calendar, and save them on the database. Along with this, we have also provided some pointers for the students, to help them prioritise their work and achieve maximum efficiency, based on our experiences as seniors. 3) Contact Information: This feature provides the contact information of all the teachers, faculty and staff, which can be used by students to easily contact them for resolution of doubts. 4) Resources - The star feature: We have created a website and linked it through the app which includes e-books, notes and video help left by the seniors, as well as overall tips as to how to crack exams, be it O-Levels or IB. Therefore we will be able to create a near-perfect medium so that no student is left out.

How we built it

We believe in logic over knowledge, so we decided to choose a software which would effectively implement the solutions, leaving more space for use of logic. For this reason, we used Thunkable, a drag-and-drop platform that can be used to make effective android applications. We started out by designing the planned out version of the app. After going through multiple drafts of name and feature proposals, we finally chose the most effective solution and decided to go along with it. Once that was done, we started working on the main design of the application. As we kept doing that, we also simultaneously put together the blocks and coding for all the elements of the application. After finishing all the individual components, we connected them all together to make a working prototype. Going through multiple tests, we were able to find errors within our hack which helped us improve our application. In the end, we finally polished down a fully working prototype of our idea and solution.

Challenges we ran into

Ironically, Thunkable turned out to restrict our work due to its lack of flexibility in its features. We were confined to use only the Thunkable library materials, and our lack of coding knowledge had us experimenting with multiple different commands and controls. Another thing that restricted us was the use of database. We did not finalise on which database to use which made us rethink some of our codes at a later stage. Another challenge that we ran into was the limit Thunkable had on the number of screens that could be used in our application. Due to this, we had to take off excess screens and moderate our usage of space. But no matter what challenges we came across, we were able to find some alternate way of looking at the problem to leap right through it and move into the next phase. It was our passion and determination to continue that lead us to successfully finishing this app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. We were successfully able to finish the building of the app, with all the features working properly
  2. We built everything from scratch: from logos to icons, everything was made by us, using our skills
  3. We were able to create a working chatbot within our application

What we learned

What's next for EduFront

We first aim to test it within a small target group to weed out possible flaws and rectify them. Then we plan to expand it to be fully implemented within our school. Once we stabilise our application's working, we aim to reach a broader audience.

Share this project:

Updates