-
Conversation between a tutor and a student about math
Inspiration
Part of our inspiration was from seeing some of our classmates who didn't care about school, let their grades plummet, and when asked questions by the teacher, they just sat there in silence. We created AnonTutor in an effort to help these kinds of students learn and improve, but also in an effort to improve our coding skills and better familiarize ourselves with what we may be asked to build in the real world, not just the things we already knew how to build.
What it does
On its homepage, AnonTutor brings you to a select bar where you can select whether you are a student or a tutor. Afterwards, you are taken to a page that brings you to the chat, which is the main feature of the website. Once you are on the chat, you are paired with someone else who is also on the chat, and you are able to help others/get help from others about your problems related to school/homework.
How we built it
We built it using the main three languages of web development: HTML, CSS, and Javascript. We ended up splitting the work between the two of us, as one of us worked on HTML and CSS, and the other worked on some HTML and Javascript. The homepage and subsequent webpages were fairly straightforward, and so were the CSS and the simpler Javascript functions. For our chat service, we used a Javascript library that takes care of most of the networking and message transferring called Bugout, which also helped us in the anonymous code generation to conceal the users' identities.
Challenges we ran into
At first, the main webpage development was fairly simple, and we attended the HTML and Javascript workshops for extra help. However, we ran into a problem while trying to link other pages with buttons, which was quickly solved with help from mentors (thank you!). While we did attend the workshops, we also had to rely on the internet and YouTube tutorials to help us with most of the coding, especially concerning the more complex parts of HTML, Javascript, and the chat feature. Although there were definitely many challenges, we put a lot of effort into it, and we're quite proud of what we've accomplished, especially considering the fact that we went into this hackathon with little to no knowledge, and it also being our first hackathon.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The accomplishment that we were most proud of was the chat service, as we had never pulled off anything like it (due to our limited code knowledge), and we were quite happy that everything was falling into place as we approached the final hours of the hackathon. Though not a typical accomplishment, we're happy that we were able to learn a lot, especially from the workshops and the help that mentors gave us.
What we learned
We learned the basics of HTML web development such as tags, buttons, selectables, check boxes, and anchor tags, among other things. We learned about CSS styling and how to apply text colors, fonts, sizes, padding, and changing the color of buttons and the background. We also learned about Javascript and how to read and store user data in variables through the getElementById function, and the fundamentals of JS programming.
What's next for AnonTutor
While the demo is pretty good at least concerning our experience and timeframe, there is still a lot we'd like to add, such as the ability to host larger chatrooms, multiple chatrooms being open at once, a login feature for tutors, and much more. In its current state, it definitely works and functions, but there's always room to add more.
P.S. Something went wrong with the GitHub, and none of the pages have CSS formatting, but all the functionality is retained, and you can contact PoweredJay#7779 for screenshots/images of the pages with formatting.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.