Academics Anonymous

Inspiration

We all share the common challenge of speaking up in class to ask a question. This website enables students to ask questions anonymously that they would not otherwise have asked in fear of being ridiculed by peers. It also acts as a system for recording questions answered during class that may be beneficial when preparing for assessments. It ultimately encourages student engagement with course content.

What it does

Academics Anonymous is a live QA session that allows students to continuously ask questions during in-class lectures. Defining features includes anonymous questions, keeping records of instructor responses and indicators of questions that multiple students want answered. Our platform allows a more efficient lecture flow by never letting questions go unanswered, accommodate for questions in large lectures and never let bad question be asked. Academics Anonymous also helps enable more productive studying with students having the ability to look back at records of questions with answers that were done in class.

How we built it

Academics Anonymous is mainly made with Node.js and React.

Challenges we ran into

During our development process, learning React.js turned out to be a much bigger challenge than initially anticipated. We overestimated our abilities to transfer skills from other languages to a new language. There were many features that we wished to implement but were unable to due to lack of technical skills.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although none of us were all too comfortable with React, we somehow managed to grasp a basic understanding of the new language. We were very proud with our idea as well as our design and execution.

What we learned

How to use node.js for back-end development
Our first encounter with Git
Using React and Bootstrap to create our own web app

What's next for Academics Anonymous

There are still many features we can add, such as, implementing a database to store questions. We wanted to have a note-taking API so it would be able to write answers to student's questions with ease using their device.