Cognoscente

Develop and Explore Practical or Theoretical STEM-Based Courses for Free

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Inspiration

I am astounded by the argosy of knowledge available on the internet. My goal in this project was to develop an app that would allow users to create and explore STEM-related courses in their areas of expertise. We are all passionate about something, and my intention is to elevate the ability of each person to express and teach their enthusiasm to others, as well as seek further learning, both in that area and in others.

What it does

Cognoscente is a course-creation app, wherein users can discover and design courses in STEM-related areas, completely for free.

How we built it

I designed Cognoscente as a flask app. I used basic web design skills (HTML, CSS, JS, etc.) to design the frontend (Javascript a bit for the backend too). I used flask routes and a mysql database to control the backend. I started by sketching all of my frontend designs (page layouts, animations, etc.). This brainstorming phase was pretty fun, and then the actual programming is when it got truly challenging.

Challenges we ran into

I ran into many issues regarding backend communication. I didn't realize at first that form elements can't be nested, and after a few hours browsing on StackOverflow and working with ChatGPT, I finally figured it out. I can't say this was my best project, but I'm grateful for the lessons I was able to learn and the experience I gained as a developer.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm honestly proud of how quickly I was able to erect this design, and I'm grateful that I took the time to sketch out my designs before doing them. I used to live by the quote that says: "Weeks of Coding can Save You Hours of Planning." But not anymore!

What we learned

I learned that a little bit of planning can go a long way. I also learned small things like how to store images as BLOBs in a mysql database and how to render the images again. I learned a lot more about best practices in web development and finally started using comments to explain my code (mostly because I kept getting confused about where I was...)

What's next for Cognoscente

I've already developed a business model for this, and it can easily (well fairly easily at least) transferred into an asset. There's a lot of good competition in this market, however, so I'm planning to casually develop it over the next few years until I can think of something to really stand out and break through the market to consumers.

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