Inkshedding

Inspiration

Hi everyone! My name is Leo, and I've been teaching for a little over 4 years. I currently teach two classes: a First-Year Interest Group Seminar for Computer Science, and a First-Year transition course for International Students. We often have a ton of activities planned that involve discussing different topics and sharing personal stories. Inkshedding is a common activity, but it comes across as less accessible because of the lack of anonymity due to the uniqueness of handwriting. I created this app as a simple posting board that is primarily meant for inkshedding, but this could also be used for polls and other forms of formative assessment.

What it does

Simply put, the app allows users to write their response to whatever the instructor asks. The response is then posted for everyone to see, but does not include their name.

How we built it

This is a CRUD app using SQLite, Node.js + Express.js for the backend, and React.js for the front end.

Challenges we ran into

At the start of the program, I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to build. I knew I wanted it to be an inkshedding app, but I did not know how I wanted to build it and what specific features I wanted it to do. I ended up jumping right into writing code, which was not a good idea because the project was not going anywhere. I also didn't know how I wanted to implement everything. I ended up taking a step back, deleting everything, and starting from scratch on paper instead of in my text editor. I drew out exactly what I wanted to accomplish, wrote down which technologies I wanted to use, and added ways to connect all of the technologies together. The product of a few hours of focus after way too many hours of clutter is this app!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud that I ended up building a functional project that I can use in my classes. While I do need to modify it a little bit and I might add user authentication, I'm glad that it works! I am also proud of learning all the technologies that I learned. I'm slowly getting more and more comfortable with React, Node + Express, and working with databases. While I have used those technologies before, I have never used SQLite (only mySQL and MongoDB), which was a very nice tool to have!

What we learned

• Sockets/Socket.io (I thought I needed these. Turns out, I did not!)
• Always draw/plan before you write code.
• More comfort with React, Node + Express, and DB connectivity.
• A lot more comfort with testing code (I used Insomnia in the past and I had to use it extensively for this project, alongside inspect element and console.log)

What's next for Inkshedding

• User authentication or submitting names (names will not be attached to the data though)
• Hosting (currently local so I cannot use it for my classes).
• Prettier UI/UX. It's currently quite plain since my focus was the functionality of the project.

Built With

• axios
• cors
• express.js
• node.js
• react
• sqlite