BeyondBe

Inspiration

The Office Of The President of the University of Ottawa challenged us to think about the social in online learning. Our team always found that the best learning is done gathered around a whiteboard in a group, so we committed to replicating that environment in a virtual all-in-one space

What it does

BeyondBe provides online spaces where multiple users can join a study room and have access to a shared collaborative whiteboard space and markdown-rendered notepad.

How we built it

BeyondBe is built using Javascript and Solace event broker. Express.js was used for the backend server, and marker was used for real-time rendering of markdown. Auth0 is also used for client authentication

Challenges we ran into

We faced several challenges while building this application.

The first of many was configuring Auth0 to correctly work with our application as none of us were familiar with it.

The synchronizing of drawing on the whiteboard and typing of text among rooms was also a challenge. Our initial implementation made use of web sockets, which worked excellently until it came time to deploy the application where we discovered web sockets have a bad habit of not working in production. It was at that time that we made the pivot to using Solace Event Broker's as we had previously researched that they could provide an alternative to web sockets. This worked great, and also allowed us to implement more functionality with Solace's hierarchical topic structure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the immense amount of progress that we are able to complete in such a short period of time. Additionally, many of the techologies (and techniques) we made use of were new to the team, so we are also very proud of how quick we were able to adapt and quickly we were able to pivot our ideas when we encountered roadblocks.