Code Global

Practice problems to learn coding
Code global in use

Inspiration

People in less fortunate situations often times do not have access to computers that would allow them to compile and run code. As a result, Code Global focuses on bringing the necessary hardware and software to these people. Consider a small village in Africa that has one school classroom. The teacher is passionate and wants the best for each of their students. Enter Code Global. Code Global gives this classroom a smartphone which contains our application for learning and practicing code. Now, students are writing code on pieces of paper and won’t stop asking their teacher to run and compile it. Code Global is a non-profit organization that focuses on allowing people in poverty situations learn to code through hardware donations and clever software.

What it does

Hardware With the proper use of donations, Code Global will provide low-budget Android smartphones for schools/classrooms in a particular area. Doing this provides students and teachers alike with a more affordable (and portable) option for learning code. Software Code Global has developed an application that will compile and run handwritten code via a picture. Doing this minimizes the cost, yet still allows students and teachers to learn how to code. Additionally, our app provides a resource for code lessons and practice problems that all use the camera compilation system to check for correctness.

How we built it

The majority of the functionality in the backend was built on NodeJS and Firebase and Google Cloud Platform, with the Optical Character Recognition* using **Google OCR. We used Jdoodle to compile the code server side. In order to leverage binary pixel classification for image sharpening, we had an endpoint on a Python Flask server.

The mobile application was built using React Native and the website was built using Bootstrap and jQuery.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the optical character recognition code to be able to read the code efficiently and accurately. Furthermore, we also had problems using Firebase at first as we are new to the service.

What's next for Code Global

With donations from sponsors and good people, Code Global’s goal is to fill every classroom in the world with the potential to learn all about coding.