Bear A Hand

join video with mentor using room code
whiteboard feature inside our video conferencing app
accessibility features for people with special needs
register yourself as a woman, rural student or disabled person.
list of all ongoing mentors and their ongoing classes
mentors can register for new classes
stats showing the no of students deprived of quality education.
our home page and theme "Bear A Hand"

Inspiration

The percentage of rural people, women, and disabled people who have no quality access to education are really shocking. This inspired us to build a solution that would bridge this unfair gap of education in our society. We believe all people have equal rights to quality education, and this website is our small step towards the future that we all envision. Through our project we are trying to build bridges between the underprivileged and education. The gap between quality education and people can be narrowed using our website.

What it does

Through our website, we aim to connect the underprivileged group with Mentors who will show them the light of education. Depending on who you are, we have classes for each of you. There will be classes for rural children where they will be taught the absolute basics, classes for women to encourage them in STEM and provide access to high-quality technical content, classes for the disabled people to learn ASL with our Mentors. Once someone registers themselves as a woman, rural person, or disabled, they'll see a list of all ongoing classes. The mentors can register themselves, and add the class descriptions along with the target audience. The app also has a video conferencing feature where n number of students and mentors can interact together and learn together. The video calling app also includes whiteboard, screenshare ,chat and a screenrecord feature.

How we built it

We built it using NodeJs, MongoDB, Ejs, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, WebRTC, Twilio, Uuid, socket connection, mongoose, javascript, etc.

Challenges we ran into

We faced some difficulties with the Mongoose connection in our project, especially while Hosting it with Heroku. We also implemented Twilio to send newsletters to everyone subscribing to our website, but due to the absence of a premium Twilio subscription, it couldn't be shown in the demo.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to present a unique and inclusive solution that meets the needs of all kinds of underprivileged groups. Our solution is unique because it not only connects you with mentors, through video conferencing but also has a lot of accessibility features such as text to audio for blind people, changing the size and color of the website for the visually impaired, changing the aesthetics for ADHD people, and so on.

What we learned

We learned the use of NodeJs, MongoDB, Twilio, WebRTC through this project as this was our first hackathon!

What's next for Bear A Hand

The upcoming features we have in mind for Bear A Hand are:

Authentication system for Students and Mentors, including Google, Facebook, Twitter authentication.
Using OpenCV to teach ASL to disabled people.
Using Twilio, we will send out Whatsapp, Email and Text messages with the class link to all students who are interested for a particular class.