Zoomy

Inspiration

We wanted to help ease virtual interaction for grade school children in the challenging world of remote learning. Our approach is inspired by their struggles to focus on class during Zoom lectures.

What it does

Our program is a Zoom companion app that resides on the teacher's and the student's devices. Teachers inititate the session and invite students to join. Students will participate during lectures and earn points based on the quality of their interaction during class. They can later spend their points to earn rewards like Zoom frames and emotes that they can use when they present during class. Teachers are given control to award points as they see fit, to reward students that use the camera, voice, or chat.

How we built it

In wanting to develop a Zoom Web App that both teachers and students can use in order to enhance their online learning experience, we went with developing this web app using the Flutter Framework for the Frontend with the help of the Dart language that managed a bit of the backend. When discussing having a database to keep track of student points we chose Firebase for it's simple database setup. For collaboration with the different features we chose using github through Visual Studio Code to help with pushing and pulling commits as well as merging certain branches when needed.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges that came with the Front-End involved getting comfortable with how the code is formatted. Unlike Android Studio and Xcode where drag and drop is possible, Flutter all code based and involved implementing widgets. Although the use of widgets made certain additions straightforward, creating an appealling layout was difficult at times but in time we became more comfortable to the Dart language.

We also ran into issues with trying to get the database connected with our Flutter Web App. Despite having little data to manage as well as understanding what design process was needed, we still struggled in the actual code implementation due to the lack of resources for connecting the Flutter web app with the Real Time Database that Firebase provides.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

There was a lot we accomplished while working on this hack. Working as a team using GitHub was big for us because it encouraged us to communicate efficiently when merging our code. Towards the end of our project we also felt comfortable using Flutter which was new to us at the start of the hackathon.

What we learned

We learned completely new technologies. Choosing Flutter to develop our app made us learn the programming language Dart and make a user interface with it. We also learned how to efficiently use branches with Git to add features to our project collaborativley. The development cycle of our app eventually brought us to the point of starting to incorporate a database and we learned more about firebase from reading the documentation.

What's next for Zoomy

Zoomy has a lot of room to grow! We would like to integrate a balanced system to algorithmically distribute points to students based on the quality of their interaction (completely removing that burden from the teacher). Another major goal is to increase the variety of rewards offered and make more exciting features that kids can get motivated for. We also want to make the app fully integrated into Zoom, complete with Oauth 2.0 to eliminate the need for a seed phrase.

Built With

• dart
• figma
• firebase
• flutter
• github
• visual-studio
• zoom