Bridge

Logo for Bridge

Inspiration

The idea behind Bridge is to create an education platform that can be used by anyone across the globe. The main inspiration was a desire to help people across the world, especially women and other marginalized groups, to have access to a constantly updating source of education to help them learn subjects they may not have the resources to learn otherwise.

What it does

The main thing this service does is allow people to view user created courses from educators and volunteers across the world to help bridge the gap in education. This allows people who may not have the opportunity to get a formal education to still learn and practice subjects they may be interested in. This is especially useful for females who historically have not had the best education in certain regions.

How we built it

We built the front end using react and yarn for launch and testing with css styling. Additionally, we used react-router to redirect pages. The backend was built using express.js with node.js, and a database to handle login information was done with mongo db.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest issues while working on this project was a lack of experience working with some of these tools, and a general lack of time. This group was mainly made up of people new to this style of competition, so a lot of the time spent was used learning how to use various resources. That on top a relatively strict time constraint made it difficult to make our vision a reality.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Even with the aforementioned setbacks, we did manage to get most of the website working. Or course some features had to be left behind and it did not look exactly as planned, but the backed end and most of the front end were completed.

What we learned

Everyone here gained a new understanding of how to use various web development tools, as well as the general procedure in creating a functional website, from idea to final release. The main programs that were learnt were using react with javascript, and figma, a service to design the visual aspect of a website.

What's next for Bridge

While the project itself is over, we hope that we can further advance this prototype into something that can make a significant impact in global education. Some features we hope to add are a more fleshed out course addition and better searching functionality. We also hope to add a way to see which courses are trending, so people will always know which topics tend to be the most popular.