Campfire Questions

Questionnaire!
Spreadsheet w/ Categories!

Inspiration

Imagine you’re sitting in a class with hundreds of other students. You have a question, but you’re not sure if you should ask it. What if it’s a redundant question? Are you bothering other students if you ask? These are some of the common questions that can plague students with anxiety whenever they might have a question! Campfire Questions can solve this problem.

What it does

Students have an interactive website user interface in which they can type their question and click submit. The question is then sent to a Google sheets spreadsheet which stores all the questions. The questions are time-stamped and are also automatically categorized using the ChatGPT API. These categories are then sorted, allowing the professor to easily see and answer the questions by topic, by time, or simply by their leisure!

How we built it

The front end of the website was made using HTML and CSS and the backend was made using JavaScript on Google Apps Script. The ChatGPT API added additional functionality by categorizing questions by topic.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge our team faced was finding an effective way to store the questions. After researching and trying several different methods, we decided to use Google Apps Script which can implement Google sheets. By using Google sheets, we were able to include other metadata about questions such as the time that the question was posted. It was also a challenge to bridge the front-end and back-end and share updated code together, which we overcame through clear communication, GitHub, and researching the internet!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of how we learned new things and worked together to attack the issues that came our way. Although we are all first-time hackers and did not have much experience, we just kept trying our best and communicated our thoughts to each other, and managed to overcome the problems.

What we learned

With this being our first hackathon, this was our initial exposure to full-stack development. We also became familiar with/improved our HTML/CSS skills as well as learned how to implement both Google Apps Script and the ChatGPT API.

What's next for Campfire Questions

We are hoping that Campfire Questions can have more added functionality such as students being able to view others’ questions and receive text transcripts to their answers. We could also improve the user interface as well.