Inspiration
The inspiration comes from our team members’ shard experience. Back in China, when we were high school students, the teachers keep telling us that the subjects, say Math, is very important. But they seldom tell us why we should learn it and how it could benefit our future career. That made us lack of motivation. We hope that we could build something to tell students why these courses are important, how could they lead to advanced studies and great careers, and also tell them the path of learning towards a desired career or achievement.
What it does
Our WebApp, knowledge labs, have three functionalities. First, starting from the user(student)’s available skills, it generates a map of knowledge where the student could discover what advanced study, skills and careers could his current courses lead to. Next, it could goes backward, starting from a career path that the student want to take in the future, and provide the career’s required skill tree. Finally, it provides a detailed view about each career, providing ways to get familiar with it, for example, links to tech blogs, MOOCs and companies. We also have a special section where the student could view a typical day of someone in that career.
How I built it
After brainstorming and several discussions about possible user story, we designed the entire storyboard together that we all agree upon. Then, we spilt the workload according our experience level and skills. While implementing the design, we kept discussing and made the final conclusion on the detailed design. Mostly, we focused on building our own look of our website using front-end languages, and utilize APIs such as IBM BlueMix and Backand to handle the backend services. That strategy saved us a lot of time
Challenges I ran into
Using multiple APIs, fast development
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
First and most important one is that we have built a visible tree-like system to represent the relationship between courses and possible career. We can expand from one course to others and lead to jobs, or from the otherwise, we start from jobs to list the required skills. Second, we are proud that we utilized several third-party APIs so simplify the work, which enormously improve our efficiency.
What I learned
In the last about 36 hours, we as a team encountered several difficulties andlots of new things. We gratefully learned a lot from them and are appreciated that we had such an unforgeable chance.
We've tried some new APIs for our first time. To simplify our work, we try to use services such as Bluemix and Back&. We are amazed how easy it was to build a web site with the help of the services and some clicks. We tried to import data from CourseHero so that we can get what we want through third-party resource instead of a heavy input by our users.
What's next for Knowledge Labs
Most importantly, we need to improve our searching algorithms both for searching jobs from selected courses and searching courses from desired jobs; We also need to design and build a more elegant way to show the relations between the jobs and courses, and also courses and courses; We would like to encourage user-generated content to make our analysis more reliable.
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