AskAnon

Session selection screen
Empty session room
User POV
Professor POV
Emojis
Firebase Dashboard
Auth0 Dashboard
Auth0 Signin

Inspiration

This semester in Deep Learning, our professor Dr. Cowan was noticing a lot of people weren't asking questions. As an experiment he started posting a google document to be used in class so people could anonymously ask questions. It's been a complete success all semester and engagement has been through the roof.

We're hoping that by providing a platform that professors can use during lecture to allow students to anonymously ask questions, students will feel more inclined to participate and ask questions.

What it does

AskAnon allows verified professors in Rutgers to create chat sessions. Creating a session generates a unique session ID that students can enter on the site to join the lecture chat and ask questions without the fear of asking a "stupid question".

How we built it

We utilized the next.js framework to create the site with Firebase as our database to store a session's message history along with new messages. Auth0 is used to allow users and professors to login, along with verifying a professor so they are able to create sessions. Auth0 also lets us verify that users are using the Rutgers email domain.

Challenges we ran into

We originally wanted to implement class polls so that the professor could generate a poll and have the entire class vote on it. However due to the time constraint we were unable to implement this feature.

We also ran into a near last minute disaster in which we exceeded our quota on Firebase and could not load any rooms or messages but were fortunate enough to spin up and configure a new Firebase app right before the submission was due.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Within a small time span we were able to completely implement a web app that allows professors to create a chatting room for their students. This felt very ambitious due to the backend and frontend requirements along with us being a team of 2.

What we learned

There's a lot that goes into the development of any web app with a basic chatting functionality. To correctly store and display user messages in multiple rooms requires careful planning along with a reasonable amount of time.