Inspiration
As students many times we go through a roller coaster ride trying to accomplish our educational goals. We sometimes feel alone, behind, confused or lost. That is why community is so important, and it is often missing or difficult to develop at our schools. This tool enables students to develop a collaborative community by being connected anonymously and randomly for on demand mentoring sessions. Students can request mentoring help from those who have already completed their class, as well as the incentive of extra credit from teachers and scholarships to mentor others who are in classes they have taken.
What it does
A user registers for our app, are paired up for a mentoring session with another student above or below their current experience level. The app maintains anonymity so that students feel safe to ask any question. It incorporates a rating system to allow both users to give feedback, which is then tracked for teachers to view and offer extra credit. We also utilize a donation from the mentee to provide scholarships to students with excellent mentoring reviews.
How I built it
We decided to use Moxtra because of its great collaboration abilities - students can chat, whiteboard, share files and screens. We also wanted to incorporate a scholarship incentive so Braintree was perfect for that. Then we used MongoDB, Heroku, Node.js and Boostrap. And of course, an awesome .club domain name to round off that community building.
Challenges I ran into
This was the first time for most of us to develop a web app, and to attend a hackathon - almost every step was a challenge, learning how to put all the pieces together from front end to back end to APIs, we're pretty much n00bs.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We were able to use this time as a team from the same college to introduce others from our school to their first hackathon as well, seeing what it's like to form a team, develop an idea, and overcome obstacles in accomplishing your goal. I am personally proud that so many of the club members were able to attend. They had such enthusiasm and fun together, even though it was a difficult thing and outside of their comfort zone. I was so happy to get to know and bond with everyone - this is the community myself and many of us have been searching for!
What I learned
We learned GitHub together, started understanding how to incorporate APIs, and so much more.
What's next for SOSMentor
The students in the (newly formed!) Computer Science Club at College of San Mateo are going to continue with this project to develop it for their school and then release it to be used by other students to actively develop communities in their own schools.
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