Literacy-Catalyst

Site built to make textbooks/guides available for free to ensure quality education for students who can't afford books . Donors can donate their gently used books.(site contains donated books only).

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Inspiration

  1. The rising cost and access of textbooks are influencing students quality of learning experience. Poor students difficult to buy textbooks and cultivate alternative resource seeking behaviour.
  2. Many students may not be knowing how to get the most out of books and also may not be having someone who can guide them through a good path to reach their goals.

What it does

  1. Students can be find free textbooks/guides donated by donors based on their field of education.
  2. Students can connect with donors ,donor information like their name ,email address, education details would help them to reach out to them easily .they can write cool emails.
  3. Template emails will be sent to donor on behalf of students to request their book , if the donor approves the book will be made temporarily unavailable for other students until the date specified by students themself . If they fail to collect the book within that period , it will be available for others from next day.

How we built it

  1. The site is built using Reactjs, Nodejs and MySQL database.
  2. External API like EmailJs is used to send template emails on behalf of students.
  3. Geolocation Api is used to access user location so the students can find nearby donors and approach them for books.
  4. Waze map is included to help students to reach out to donors.
  5. Filters like sorting books based on book name , author are done very efficiently using React cache and MYSQL queries.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Finding a way for students to reach out to donors was bit challenging.
  2. Helping both of them to agree upon a date and making book unavailable for others at that period also took us some time.
  3. Using external API like EmailJs to send template emails .
  4. Authentication of users based of email as they should be verified so we can use them to connect donor and students.
  5. Helping students find their required books among wide range of streams or education fields within two to three select menus also required a lot of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Idea of improving quality education for poor students came out so good , connecting people via books to spread knowledge , building a healthy relation ,reaching out for study related queries etc is what makes me proud about the time spent on this project.
  2. Handling needs of various kind of users like both students and donor experience is handled so nicely ,so both can gain good user experience.
  3. Finding books , book information, donor details, book Pickup address, selecting a date by student for reaching out to donors , including additional message for donors and sending the request is so brilliantly handled within a single book card . i.e. a card contains book details on front of the card .donor details ,book Pickup address ,Waze map , button to contact donor , calender interface to select date , additional message field is all included at the back of card . book card can be flipped to get the donor details.
  4. So the student can immediately find the book , know the donor ,send request within same time without any delay or lot of clicks.
  5. Donor can approve/reject the request by following a simple link attached to mail.
  6. Overall user experience is brilliantly handled.

What we learned

  1. Learnt how to provide good user experience keeping in mind both donor and user .
  2. Learnt how to use external APIs like EmailJs to send template emails,how to geolocation to find nearby people to our location , how-to include Waze map , cache ing the request to improve user experience.
  3. How to handle vast number of books by categorising them accordingly. Fetching any kind of books of any category,field , subject are handled within a single fetch request .so reducing the number of request to server are minimised. This is what I learnt through this project , and many more small things which actually have a huge effect.

What's next for Literacy-Catalyst

  1. I would like to make this Connect app just similar to any social media platform , where books keep circulating among students, two kinds of account donor and student accounts for every user can be made.
  2. A wider platform to connect people within their surroundings via books , so every generation books can reach the next generation easily and minimize the purchasing of new books everytime by every individual student.
  3. Currently I am using geolocation api to access their location , including Google api would increase the user experience to another level.
  4. EmailJs is limited to send only 200 free template mails , which needs to be upgraded for more.
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