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A few screens from the conceptual app
Classdrive
About 200 million people are enrolled in universities and colleges around the world. As of today, the most accepted mode of communication is WhatsApp. Usage statistics show, however, that WhatsApp is better suited to general-purpose, everyday conversations than to the special needs of college students.
What if, for once, the rules of internet messaging are modified to allow for classroom communication? What if students are allowed an intelligent way to share, not just small talk and trivia, but the essential bits of information that make for a worry-free studentship? What if we extended this to allow for result, grade, assessment, and activity tracking? What if Classdrive is the answer?
What it does
Classdrive is the social network made specifically for college students. Period. Classdrive is engineered to accommodate for every form of information transmission that are peculiar to students of tertiary institutions, from snapshots of class notes to audio and visual recordings, and extends even to the accumulation of past questions and other study materials, regardless of the kind. For the first time in the history of tertiary education, students would be able to seamlessly share Office documents, CAD designs, code snippets and just about anything else, in a way that neither WhatsApp, Telegram nor Slack is capable of.
A revolution is upon us. One made for us - the young, by us.
When a student for whatever reason is unable to attend an academic activity, Classdrive is how such students can re-live the sessions. And in situations where a course/top isn't well understood, others would be able to assist in the a most engaging manner.
How it was built
This proof of concept (PoC) was prototyped with React.js for the front end, and Node.js (Express) for the back end. Data was modelled in a MongoDB datastore, And our deployment pipeline was Netlify/Heroku, to take advantage of the CI/CD workflow. We plan to use the Twilio API for SMS notification, and Cloudinary + Google Cloud Storage for block storage.
Challenges I ran into
Working on various projects at once and trying to meet up was literally complicated. Power supply and internet connection were other issues we faced, with the team fighting so hard to stay connected. Team coherence also came at huge cuts in development time, as we really were not in sync until halfway down the week.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The design mockup presented in the link below is a nice visualization of what we have in mind. We are also confident that, with our development and deployment model, there will be little room for bugs in a finished product.
What I learned
The best ideas take significant time to build, and time was simply not on our side.
What's next for Classdrive
With the right financial backing, Classdrive could easily become a name in communication, competing for user time with every major communication channel. And once we acquire substantial stake of the student population, there's no limit to what else is possible.
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