Communilearn - Grow Together

An event platform for everyone to share and gain knowledge, to grow as a community and to become better people.

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Inspiration

The Communilearn team is committed to ideas such as kindness, generosity, sustainable free access to knowledge and personalized education. We also wanted to help people from small communities connect through these ideas. Community centers are a great way for people to get to know each other and do activities to bring them together, but we found that a lack of modernity in their systems prevented them from being enjoyed by as many people as possible. Through Communilearn, people with a passion and who want to gain experience in public speaking, mentoring, or tutoring have a platform to set up activities in community centers to reach others who are looking to learn particular skills while paying as little as possible.

What it does

There are 3 parts to Communilearn:

1) Attendee App

Through this Android application, users who are interested in attending a seminar, workshop, tutorial, or activity would access the schedule of a particular community center and register for an event. They would be able to add filters to the list of events, such as topics (Arts, Sciences, Environment, etc.), the number of sessions that an event includes, and whether they need to bring equipment (or buy gear through the community center). Using this app, users would be getting free knowledge (or at least. knowledge that's very cheap)!

2) Online Presenter Form

Using an HTML form, users who are interested in giving a talk can let the community centers near them know what kind of activity they could bring to the table. They can specify the type of activity (seminar, workshop, tutorial, sports game, discussion group, etc.), the number of seats they would want, whether people would need to bring gear or buy it, whether their multiple activities are serialized, and many other options. This way, presenters can let the community centers know the exact parameters of their activity so that they can help as many people as possible, in the best way they can. The online HTML form was judged to be a more secure and reliable way to share forms to the community center than the use of an Android application.

3) Communilearn Center Platform

Using a Java PC application, community centers would (ideally) be able to manage the presenters' requests to host activities and the attendees' requests to attend these activities. This would show tables of all the different options that the presenters selected. Then, event coordinators from the community centers could then contact the presenters and authorize their activities. They would also confirm the attendees' seats. This desktop application seemed like the most efficient way to deal with a lot of data, but its implementation is not complete.

How we built it

The Android application was created using Android Studio and Java. HTML forms were used for the online presenter form. Java and javafx were used for the basic UI design of the community center platform.

Challenges we ran into

We did not know how to do web development besides for some basic HTML, so learning about XAMPP, my SQL, PHP, and the Google Cloud Platform was quite challenging. In the end, we couldn't implement them, but we are grateful for the exposure to these technologies.

We were all familiar with Java, but none of us knew anything about GUIs. Learning about them was not as simple as predicted, so it slowed down the development of our app.

Out of the 4 team members, only one of us knew how to develop applications for Android. Again, learning a whole new development environment was not an easy task. We are proud of what was achieved in so little time.

There were many highly interesting workshops during the hackathons, we simply had to go talk to all the developers and software engineers to learn more about their companies, ideas or simply to get more familiar with technologies such as GitHub. We had less time to work on our project, but breaks are essential, even if you only have 24 hours to make it happen.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of having an Android application up and running. Seeing our first Java GUI in effect was quite satisfying, too. Having an interactive webpage is great, since before this hackathon, we could only do static webpages.

But the thing that we are most proud of is our idea. We took a lot of time to think about how we would want to give back to our community using software, and to us, Communilearn seems like the best way to do so. This project was made in honour of all the mentors, teachers, and helpers that have marked our lives and have done so out of the kindness of their heart.

What's next for Communilearn

If all goes well and the team members stay in touch, we would like to finish our project by doing the following: first, we would want to finish the desktop application so that the community centers could better organize our data.

Then, hopefully, we would like to connect all 3 instances of our project by setting up a website. We already have a domain name - www.communilearn.org ! In a year, we might even have a fully functionning platform.

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