Inspiration
Haven't we all had gone through the experience of filling that long tedious course review after the end of the semester! It always made me wonder, this would so much more useful to me if I had a chance to post my thoughts about the lectures during the semester. That way, the professor can really know what topics students didn't understand and may be he'd try to teach it again! And who needs a big complicated form? All you need is one feedback box for each student and some intelligent programming to make good meaning of it!
What it does
Lecture Hub is one unified platform for students and teachers to collaborate and make the education experience even better! Students can post short reviews of every single lecture they attend to convey what they liked and what they didn't! They can even take notes on LectureHub for every lectures! Teachers can use it to get a better idea of what students think about the course and what he/she can do to make the lecture experience even better! Lecture Hub generates useful insights about the overall student opinion of the class. May be, a lot of students didn't understand one concept during the last class, the teacher can use this insight and decide to teach it again! It can also provide with useful knowledge charts, for example, a timeline view of general student opinion about course lectures etc.
How we built it
We started by creating a general outline of what we wanted to build. This mostly involved brainstorming ideas and white-boarding. After we were clear of what we wanted to build, the next task to create a very basic skeleton of the web-app with core functionalities. We split the tasks among ourselves. One did the UI design, one worked on database, one worked on the business logic while one worked on experimenting with Cognitive APIs. Next step was to integrate the code (this took a while, phew!) and later on, we went on to build additional features that enhance user experience even further. Bugs never left our side, they were there with us throughout so bug-fixing was a continuous process! Finally, it was about the finishing touches followed by deployment and now finally, this article!!
What we used to build it: Our software platform is web-app. It is an integration of Web Technologies like HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Python as programming language, frameworks and tools like Django, sqlalchemy, Azure Database Platform and most importantly Microsoft Cognitive Services API for Text Analytics, Sentiment Alalysis etc.
Challenges we ran into
- TIME!! TIME!! TIME!! ;-) (Also, how to keep ourselves awake, throughout!!)
- Integrating the code-base
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This is our first hackathon (more will follow soon for sure!) and we gave our best shot, we're definitely proud of that!! We actually went through the process of thinking an idea and actually building it, so that was cool! Collaborating and working with a team with one unified goal in mind and to be able to successfully do that was a pretty good achievement for us!
What we learned
You need patience to build anything, especially when you're writing code, so be calm. Even if a bug haunts you in your sleep, just don't give up! It will go away! No problem is big, it may look like one initially. Break it down to smaller chunks of problems and then tackle those one by one and before you know it, you'd have solved the problem!! Building is the best way of learning!
What's next for Lecture Hub
Immediate next, it goes in our Resume ;-) 36 hours was too less to actually build everything that we visualized! Hopefully, we can materialize this with even better ideas so that it can really become a useful tool for people!
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