Whole Story
We’re ‘Runtime Error’, a group of students who understand and experience the everyday woes of learning in a pandemic. It has not been easy for students globally to adapt to remote learning primarily because of the medium in which classes are taught. Because of this, we created a solution that remedies this: a console application that simultaneously records and organizes online lectures for ease access when it comes time to review or study
How many hours did you put into this project?
~ Roughly 10 hours
Inspiration
Over the Spring semester most, if not all colleges moved to teach remotely. Most thought of this to be a great idea given that professors would have to record their lectures so that students can always go back to them. Nevertheless, in most cases, professors would start a lecture and end up going off on a tangent to speak about unimportant or irrelevant information. As students our attention span is already very low; realisticly, we only care about the important information taught in the lecture. So, when students decide to start reviewing for an exam, it becomes very time consuming to just listen to a professor rant about irrelevant or redundant information. Instead, why not just listen to a shortened, more concise lecture that only talks about the important concepts taught in class. Presenting ScreenSnatch - rather than listening to that 1.5-hour lecture - you now have an opportunity to keep a short recording of the important topics discussed in class, which could then be used to study off of.
How I built it
Accomplishments that We're proud of / What did we learn
This hackathon was unlike any other experience. None of the students on the team knew each other prior to the hackathon. It was overall, one of the greatest experiences that we all had. During the first 12 hours, our group focused more on finding a project to work on. We came up with about 5 ideas each from each other. Ultimately, we came down to 3 ideas that we could potentially work on. After speaking to a mentor, we finalized the idea and all started researching what to work on. Some of us knew very little about how to build out the idea, but we strived together to get it done. CTP is set on two distinct paths - Web Development and Data Science - Both of which rarely use Java in their tech stack. This project let our team either learn more about Java or refresh ourselves of what we learned in the past about Java.
Challenges I ran into
One major issue was that most of the team wasn't familiar with Java or used to writing with it. Nevertheless, this was our first hackathon and we were very eager to learn what we should each work on. We all knew that it would be unfair if only a few worked on the application while the rest didn't, so we put our skills together and started researching and trying to help where ever it was needed. In terms of technicalities, an issue that we were facing is merging both the audio and the video together. The way that it runs is that it captures the audio in one file and the video in the other file. We are working to get that in-sync.
What's next for ScreenSnatch
Some ideas that we came up with was to automatically save the recording to Google Drive and/or DropBox. Another idea that we thought of was to integrate NLP and ML into the application so that the app automatically captures the video recording during the lecture.
How you built it?
Knowing that students use different operating systems, we wanted to create something that could be used universally, therefore we used Java. It's known to be a low-level language that would be great for this task. In the process of making it, we had to rely on several tutorials and obviously Stackoverflow.
Which prize category does your project best fit into?
We would like to compete for 'Best Overall'
View our Product Presentation at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19jNGtyDvVOtO0_o8qXUJ-aD8Meugs624/view?usp=sharing
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