StudentLive

Our group hoped to make conversation between students and teachers more fluid and accessible during lectures and classes with a Google Chrome Extension. A key problem our group identified was a lack of opportunity for students to engage with teachers during lectures or class. It can often be daunting to raise your hand among a sea of students, so we wanted to find a solution to help students feel comfortable in the learning process. We are helping students feel more comfortable asking questions by creating an anonymous online messaging platform that can be used during lectures. By encouraging students to be curious and fully understand concepts, we hope to promote a positive learning environment at schools and make learning a more enjoyable experience. We envision our extension being used in classes from elementary schools to universities, allowing students to feel comfortable asking specific questions directly to a teacher. Our project falls on the education track and the beginner overlay, as our team has never participated in a Hackathon. It also appeals to the theme of the Hackathon, as it allows students to learn in a more effective way and mitigates potential fear of asking a question in front of a large class. We created our Google Chrome Extension by using HTML, CSS, Javascript, and React. Some of our group members had some prior experience with one of multiple of these languages, but all of us primarily learned these languages as we developed the extension. We developed our project ethically by citing all sources we used, as well as genuinely engaging with the code and creating all content submitted on our own. The StudentLive chrome extension opens a popup interface, which includes buttons for changing the width of the popup (to show more of your screen behind), a “go live” button (to redirect students to the slide of the presentation that the teacher is on), and the student and teacher buttons (to declare the user as either a student or a teacher). The teacher is able to create a class from the extension that gets posted on a separately hosted API by adding a class code to the text box in the heading and clicking “create class.” Alternatively, a student is able to use the same class code to join their teacher’s class. Students and teachers are also able to post questions or comments in the main body of the popup, as well as reply to them and upvote questions that have already been posted