Questions?

Inspiration

Almost all undergraduate students, especially at large universities like the University of California Berkeley, will take a class that has a huge lecture format, with several hundred students listening to a single professor speak. At Berkeley, students (including three of us) took CS61A, the introductory computer science class, alongside over 2000 other students. Besides forcing some students to watch the class on webcasts, the sheer size of classes like these impaired the ability of the lecturer to take questions from students, with both audience and lecturer frequently unable to hear the question and notably the question not registering on webcasts at all. This led us to seek out a solution to this problem that would enable everyone to be heard in a practical manner.

What does it do?

Questions? solves this problem using something that we all have with us at all times: our phones. By using a peer to peer connection with the lecturer’s laptop, a student can speak into their smartphone’s microphone and have that audio directly transmitted to the audio system of the lecture hall. This eliminates the need for any precarious transfer of a physical microphone or the chance that a question will be unheard. Besides usage in lecture halls, this could also be implemented in online education or live broadcasts to allow participants to directly engage with the speaker instead of feeling disconnected through a traditional chatbox.

How we built it

We started with a fail-fast strategy to determine the feasibility of our idea. We did some experiments and were then confident that it should work. We split our working streams and worked on the design and backend implementation at the same time. In the end, we had some time to make it shiny when the whole team worked together on the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

We tried the WebRTC protocol but ran into some problems with the implementation and the available frameworks and the documentation. We then shifted to WebSockets and tried to make it work on mobile devices, which is easier said than done. Furthermore, we had some issues with web security and therefore used an AWS EC2 instance with Nginx and let's encrypt TLS/SSL certificates.

Accomplishments that we're (very) proud of

With most of us being very new to the Hackathon scene, we are proud to have developed a platform that enables collaborative learning in which we made sure whatever someone has to say, everyone can hear it. With Questions? It is not just a conversation between a student and a professor in a lecture; it can be a discussion between the whole class. Questions? enables users’ voices to be heard.

What we learned

WebRTC looks easy but is not working … at least in our case. Today everything has to be encrypted … also in dev mode. Treehacks 2020 was fun.

What's next for Questions?

In the future, we could integrate polls and iClicker features and also extend functionality for presenters and attendees at conferences, showcases, and similar events. _ Questions? _ could also be applied even broader to any situation normally requiring a microphone—any situation where people need to hear someone’s voice.