Syllabase

The World's Education at Your Fingertips

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Inspiration

Teachers from all over the world, including my own previous teachers, have been lacking resources. They want to interact with other teachers to get course material or inspiration for their own curriculum, but they have no easy way to do so. They cannot attend professional development conferences everyday, and are only limited to educators in their geographical vicinity in many cases. That is why I created Syllabase, to connect educators across the world so they can instantly access the world's educational resources through technology.

What it does

Syllabase is the premier "database of syllabi". It connects educators across the world with each other to share their teaching material and inspire others to incorporate what they found successful in the classroom into their classrooms. Anyone can create an account. Users create entities, that can be anything they want to share with the world's educator community, including book recommendations, presentations, curriculum ideas, links to resources, worksheets, and much more. If a user sees an entity they like, they can add it to a syllabus, an organized collection of entities. Anyone can create a syllabus and anyone can view it. Syllabase is a perfect platform for teachers to communicate and share their best resources with the world to make it a better place.

How I built it

I used Google Firebase on the backend, with Firebase Authentication, the Cloud Firestore Database, and Google Cloud Storage. The made the frontend using React JS.

Challenges I ran into

This was my first time using a Backend as a Service for a backend instead of creating my own backend. I was not familiar with the Firebase API and had to do some extensive debugging with the database and the authentication services. However, I believe it was worth the time for I gained experience in using this new branch of modern technology. I also have to worry less about scaling and the backend, because Firebase takes care of much of that for me and I could focus on making the app.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that I could navigate the Firebase API and get the basics of the database and authentication working.

What I learned

I learned about how teachers could really benefit from a sharing platform for educational material, especially in places where teaching resources are limited and literacy rates are low, like in Africa. Programming wise, I learned how to integrate a BaaS (Backend as a Service) into React, and how to use this new piece of technology into my future projects

What's next for Syllabase

Syllabase is built to scale and becomes more useful when more people use it. Therefore, it's future is brighter than ever. I plan to add messaging functionality between users, enhance the speed of the application, and scale it to all continents for educators in Africa to have access to material from US educators, and educators across the world.

Attached Below are the links to the demo site and the github repo

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