Connexa: The community for students, by students

School Page UI
Games Page UI
Research Page UI
Register Page UI
Login Page UI

Inspiration

As university students, we saw firsthand the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on morale and how the overall sense of community was decreasing. We started brainstorming on ways to solve this problem, and we realized that the sense of community might have been lowering with the switch to online classes because there wasn't really a way to communicate on a platform with your friends or your classmates that was integrated with the learning management system that schools currently use. As such, as a leap of fate during this hackathon, we decided to make a web platform that, integrated with an LMS, could help you not only communicate more easily with teachers, administration and staff, but also have sections where you can play online games with your friends and invite them to it. We felt it was of the utmost importance that, as much as students study, students should have a way to decompress and engage with classmates, which contributes to making the university experience enjoyable.

What it does

Our web application lets you create posts on the school tab, depending on which class you would like your post to be associated with. Indeed, once you create a post, you can choose to have it anonymous or with your name associated, and you can also create threads underneath each post. We divided the tabs based on school, research and games. The research tab works very similarly to the school tab, where students can write posts in a forum-like style, and the main difference is that the posts can be categorized as general, opportunities, ect., such that everyone can ask general questions about research on this platform and teachers, students or Tas can answer and help everyone learn more from the shared information, as posts stay on the page for everyone to see. The final tab is the games tab, which lets you play games with your friends, by inviting them, and then you can choose from a list of games such as scriblio, codenames, ect. Once you log in, you can input your class email which prompts the system, once integrated with your school learning management system, to list the forums of the classes you are taking such that it is easy to find all the posts made by other students on our application.

How we built it

Before starting the project, we discuss and planned our database system, as well as our stakeholders and our user requirements, which was very important to see what we thought was most required for the application to be a success. Then, we started working on the application with React as our frontend and Express and MongoDB for managing the backend. The application was then deployed on Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

Working on this project came with its fair share of challenges, such as the integration between the backend and the frontend, which took a lot of time compared to how much we had planned. Furthermore, we started our application with an sql database and then switched to no-sql to make accessing and posting data more easily for one of our schema, but this change implied a restructuring of the database, which took more time to implement and could have been avoided had we discussed more on the implications of that schema on other components of our database.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we're very proud to have a product to show, albeit not complete, but still our own project that we coded within the time allotted. Seeing the code come to life on web pages and building a sense of belonging with other students on this hackathon was an experience we're not close to forgetting, and we're very thankful that, even if we are all affected by the online proceedings because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were still able to learn new frameworks, build upon our knowledge and grow from our challenges.

What we learned

This hackathon was a learning experience like no other, because we were able to work on a project that we liked, that inspired us and that we felt was important for our community in these times. Knowing how to communicate with our teammates when we had questions, aspects of a large-scale project planning in software technologies and the soft skills that you don't normally learn in class were aspects that we were very thankful to learn.

What's next for Connexa: The community for students, by students

We still have a lot to do before our application can be deployed to the public, mainly with the integration with universities' learning management systems such as MyCourses or Canva. Indeed, we'd like for our application to have even more tabs and features such as personal chat with students on the platform, tagging students and staff and searches that we can use to find important posts based on tags added to those posts. We're very Schoolexcited for what's next with this project, and hopefully we can contribute to making student experiences online feel more like a community, a place where students learn but also grow as individuals.