Inspiration
A teacher’s job is not only limited to marking and teaching, it also consists of several other activities that ensure that their students are receiving the best quality of education that they can receive. preparing lessons, creating tests, and attending meetings are just a few of the many tasks that teachers perform daily. Reducing the time spent on putting in and sending marks allows teachers to have more time to focus on other, more important assignments and hopefully grants them more free time to look after themselves.
What it does
AutoMark Updater helps teachers to automate the process of sending emails to many students. Our web app takes the subject, student names, student marks, student emails, and the login information to their Gmail. After processing the information, our program instantly sends an email to all students with a standardized message and a report card attached that includes their name, subject, and mark.
How we built it
AutoMark Updater was made using HTML and many Python libraries that help with various aspects. Django was crucial for requesting the inputs from the web app and implement them into our program. SMTP/MIME was used to send emails to multiple recipients with a subject line and an attached photo of their report card. PIL (Python Image Library) helps create the attached image of the report card by adding a custom name, subject, and mark to the report card template.
Challenges we ran into
At first, we were all unfamiliar with the majority of the python libraries we used. Due to our limited knowledge of the python libraries we used, there was a lot of experimentation and error which caused frustration and many changes in our final product. Fortunately, the documentation provided helped us understand the proper syntax and application of various methods and functions used in our program. But, the greatest challenge we faced has to be taking the inputs from the web app. It was especially infuriating to see our code work with variables that were defined inside the file, but fail miserably when we attempted to take input from our web app with Django. It took many hours of searching, and experimentation throughout the weekend to finally grasp how Django works and properly implement it into our program.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The sense of accomplishment that we after 10+ hours of coding when our program finally worked definitely made it worth the time and effort each of us put into this project. The most rewarding part of this hackathon was definitely the experience and learning new skills. Since this was our first Hack-a-Thon, we had no clue what to expect from it. After finishing our project, we have definitely grown as programmers and the experience is something we will never forget.
What's next for AutoMark Updater
Everything always has some room for improvement, and for AutoMark Updater we still have a long way to go. For starters, our program only works with Gmail accounts so it would be ideal to integrate the use of other emails domains such as outlook or yahoo. Moreover, it would be more efficient if our program could work with other applications namely, Google Classroom and Markbook. If we are able to directly access the marks from google classroom, it would be a lot quicker than typing it by hand into our web app.
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