The four of us came together with the same underlying purpose: to help make our world a cleaner and more environmentally friendly place. We were also intrigued by the necessity of reform in our education system and the teaching techniques used to explain complex subject matter. We began to brainstorm what we could do that would combine environmental conservation and education improvement and then we thought of... textbooks! The hefty books filled with pages and pages of key terms and lessons are both ineffective and detrimental to our environment. What would make concepts easier and more interesting to understand, we thought... and being the hackathon enthusiast that he is, James thought of Augmented Reality (AR) of course! Why couldn't we have a molecular-like structures to showcase the chapters within a textbook, and then be able to break down each concept into its component parts to delve deeper. The student could simply use their phone to access all of the lesson plans in their classroom, and then go from lesson to lesson through their AR lense to not only grasp the material better, but be more engaged as well!
Some of the challenges we faced were with Swift and toggling between the Storyboard and programming interfaces. Some of the team members took out the time to teach the beginner team members how to navigate and work in Xcode, which took up time but was overall deemed necessary for the best hackathon experience and culture. Additionally, some of our team members were not able to download the same updated operation system, and we had to conform to make sure all of us were on the same page. Furthermore, the AR portion was difficult to get started with. The main issue was that we were using .obj instead of .dae. When we were able to figure that out, we were able to represent a topic in each of the textbook that our product currently have.
We also had some issue with our Xcode system in which our project file got corrupted. This resulted in us having to make a new Github repo and we were very fortune that our code was not gone. Another thing that we decided to do was to take advantage of Firebase in which we were able to build an App for the teachers to use so that they can assign textbooks to their classroom. Building the teacher's application was not easy since it involved a lot of reading and writing to Firebase. As much as having an AR application would be the selling point of this app, not making it easy to assign textbooks for the class room would be something that would hurt the application. But with the power of our team's UI designers we were able to build a very simple and ease to use UI that gets all the job done.
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