Big Brother

Inspiration

One problem we find with online lectures is that focusing can be difficult. It's very tempting to check your phone, go on social media, and be taken in by a wide variety of other distractions. So we thought: why not give you no choice but to pay attention?

What it does

As the name suggests, Big Brother watches you. Specifically, it watches you watch your lectures. And as an added incentive to work hard, you'll be asked to create a cute pet - dog, cat or penguin - which you'll then have to watch get sadder and sadder unless you maintain focus and display emotion the lecturer requries of you. By default, this is a neutral expression, but if he tells a joke, you better laugh, or face the consequences...

That's right, we've brought emotional manipulation to online learning! You wouldn't dare not find the lecturer funny if it would make this puppy sad, right? Don't be a monster.

How we built it

The backend is a web server built with Flask, and the AWS server is built with Python. We also used Json for server requests and HTML, CSS and JavaScript for frontend. Emotion recognition uses tensorflow.

Challenges we ran into

Initially we started using Electron to create a desktop application but ran into some problems due to the lack of DOM and other JavaScript issues, so we switched over to a web application instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a range of skill levels in our team, and we all pushed ourselves to try new things and break our personal boundaries (thanks to Big Brother, in more ways than one!) For some of us this meant trying to train a neural network to recognise emotions. For others this meant spending hours trying to centre text. (Why is it so hard????)

What we learned

-Electron is fun, but painful and webdev is better sometimes -AWS is fun, but painful -CSS is painful

What's next for Big Brother

We'd love to watch you all the time, but for now we'll settle with the following features we initially planned to implement: -User login page for students and lecturers -Fully fleshed out lecturer control panel so they can view all the pets -Animation for the pet rather than static images