Inspiration
As 1A students at the University of Waterloo, we faced many struggles in our first two weeks of university attempting to remember all the new information. We naturally began to quiz each other on concepts throughout the day. Thus, when Hack the North came along and we discovered Twilio’s intuitive SMS API, we were inspired to automate this process and quiz ourselves on topics we struggle with most.
What it does
Studies in education and memory show that students retain facts and concepts better if exposed to them over a prolonged period of time, rather than cramming in one sitting. Career Goose allows users to input quiz questions and flashcards to receive them throughout the day as SMS messages, reinforcing the information.
How we built it
Utilizing our group members’ diverse experience in various programming languages and platforms, we implemented Twilio’s SMS API into a web app using HTML, CSS, Javascript, and node.js.
Challenges we ran into
Lacking experience and knowledge in node.js and APIs proved to come with many challenges. As well, learning to collaborate across platforms and implement each other’s ideas in a short timespan had its own multitude of difficulties.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite not attaining the final project that we had originally hoped for, we all learned to persevere and push each other to keep working hard during our first in-person hackathon. With hours spent troubleshooting bugs and perusing Stack Overflow, we are proud to have persisted over the entire weekend and come out with several functional features. We hope to continue to be proud of this project as we develop it further in the future.
What we learned
Having come into this hackathon with barely any knowledge in any subject areas, we all learned plenty about each of the technical platforms that we worked with.
What's next for Carrier Goose
Carrier Goose will continue to grow as we implement user input for scheduled texts and integrate a reply feature in the Twilio API. As well, we hope to host the website to allow others to use the web app for their studies.
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