UrbanizeEDU

Logo with tagline
Sign-in/sign-up page
Sign-in page
Sign-up page
Main screen
"Account" page
"Create post" page
"Select post type" page
"All posts"page
Example post page
"Delete post" page
"Change name" page
"Change password" page
Quit application page
About this app

Judges: Use Username: lenovojudges | Password: lenovojudges2022

Inspiration

This year was our first full year back to in-person school since March 2020. While we are all thrilled to be back, we have noticed clusters of students missing for days — sometimes weeks — at a time due to illness. While they were out, these students often fell behind on classwork, faced difficult learning situations, and could not effectively communicate with peers and educators. Even upon their return, the vast majority were lost and could not follow the rest of the class. As a result of this experience, we were inspired to create an app that could help students (and schools) stay connected, keep students up to date, and provide a safe online learning community. So, we created an app to do exactly that: create a virtual “city” of interconnected learners with a shared goal of helping each other succeed throughout their educational journey.

What it does

UrbanizeEDU is designed to bring students together from a wide variety of schools in one place to promote educational discussion. This safe online environment is free from internet “trolls” and other distractors, many of whom are inappropriate and potentially dangerous for students. Upon launching the app, users are greeted with a clean and simple UI. From there, they can choose either to login or create an account with their name, username, password with 8 or more characters, and school code.

Our solution is unique in that it fosters rich educational discussion free of charge while ensuring student safety. Alternative social media platforms, such as Instagram and Snapchat, prove to be a challenging environment for identifying high-quality students and instead may prove to be a hindrance to students' experiences. With this app, we also have the ability to not only partner with individual school districts, but also collaborate with state-wide school systems. For example, the New York State Department of Education now mandates all public schools include mental health education as a fundamental pillar of a school's curriculum. Apps like UrbanizeEDU would allow school districts to post mental health resources both for their students and for other users. The benefits of such use cases are limitless.

The UI is very simple, meaning it is difficult to get sidetracked or lost while using the app: simply find discussions, post, comment, and create your community.

How we built it

We chose to use MIT App Inventor to build our app. However, our head programmer, Tyler Murphy, decided we would have to create a node.js backend server first because MIT App Inventor does not offer the means to create a remote server for users (which we needed to create accounts, login, and create public posts.) After quickly creating a simple server, we coded the app in MIT App Inventor. Again, we ran into some limitations with our UI design in MIT App Inventor, but we were eventually able to create a basic version of our vision for the app as a proof of concept.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into was figuring out a way to allow students to create accounts while keeping unauthorized users out and also providing an updated list of posts simultaneously. So, we decided to create a node.js backend server to hold all the sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, and session information, and created the app in MIT App Inventor. The server is linked to the app so that the app will display the most up-to-date information.

Creating a more polished GUI was also difficult. MIT App Inventor is great for a basic concept, but we were trying to create a more polished look that was not possible with this platform. In the future, we may be able to switch to something that allows us to create a more professional-looking app, but for now, the current GUI is as clean and simple as possible.

Next Steps

We look forward to adding a more refined way for users to search for posts. Right now, creators can choose to categorize their own posts, but users cannot search for posts by category. We would also like to sort by region and/or specific school name so students can decide who they'd like to interact with. Furthermore, while a category for tutoring/study session requests already exists on the app, there is no way to arrange these sessions within the app itself. Hosting meetings directly on the app would prevent students and educators from needing to make arrangements outside of the app’s security. Finally, a more aesthetically-pleasing GUI is a major goal since our team believes the look and feel of an app contribute to the user experience. As of right now, the GUI is basic, but this can be easily updated with a different platform.

We also plan to grow a userbase for our app by effectively marketing UrbanizeEDU to school districts that wish to foster an online learning community. We hope we can not only partner with school districts, but also with colleges and universities, which will add to the depth of our app’s content and expand our userbase to a broader audience.

What we learned

Working together on UrbanizeEDU helped our group learn how to function effectively as a team. The development process highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of each team member, as well as how to divide the necessary work to create a fully functional app. We found the most important takeaway to be how we, as inventors, can figure out what people need. Creating solutions for problems is impossible when you don't know those problems exist. Throughout this experience, we not only learned how to determine what is in demand, but also the technical skills needed to help ameliorate challenges facing our most valuable populations.