Inspiration
With online lectures, student engagement with the teacher is limited to either the chat box linked to the lecture software or actual talking via the voice/video channel. However, many students are reluctant to turn on cameras or speak up in front of the entire class especially in an online setting. This leaves the chat software to be a messy primary way to engage with the students.
What it does
Apingo is a tool to be used alongside online lectures with a smaller class size of 20-30. Apingo helps to solve this problem by using a free response answer to help the teacher engage with the students as well as a ping function to let the teacher know if the student is unclear about their answer or a topic in general.
How I built it
This was a solo project and I started late, so I wanted something that was simple yet still impactful to the teaching community. I started with the very basic html and javascript connections by building a simple beginner application, then storyboarded the big ideas for my program. I chose google firebase as my database because it could both host and story my data. It was also recommended to me by a friend.
Challenges I ran into
Getting Google firebase to work at first was a bit of a challenge, because I had only used the Realtime Database before and not Google Firestore. Getting the collections and documents sorted and data organized into something that I can use and access took much longer than expected. As well, learning the idea of a asynchronous listener in Javascript was a new concept for me.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm very proud that I can maintain a NoSQL database like Firestore with this app. I'm also proud of how it looks, as this was my first interaction with CSS alongside the HTML.
What I learned
I learned the basics of the asynchronous listeners in Javascript and how powerful they really can be, as well as the importance of cleaning your listeners after them being used.
What's next for Apingo Ngage
Currently, the class sizes are best suited for high school classes and college discussion lectures. Later, I'd like to develop a function for other students to vote or ping other students answers that they find interesting so that the teacher recieves only the interesting answers that can be further discussed. This way, classes of 200-300 students can use Apingo without the teacher being overwhelmed with pings and answers. Furthermore, in the "Middle Room" podcast with Grant Sanderson of 3blue1brown, he discusses a problem with the Youtube lectures that he is doing where he is not able to parse through the youtube chat and find interesting questions. In the future, I would like to develop a way for students to ask questions as well as answer, using the function described above as a sorting element for engaging questions.
Link to Github https://github.com/QwertycowMoo/HackThis2020/tree/master
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