Counsel.me

Chatting page
Login page
School selection page
Logo
Main page
Elevation page

Inspiration

The motivation behind our project is to help students and their parents better connect with their guidance counselors and school administration to address problems within the school communities. We wanted to make this easily accessible to students and parents alike.

What it does

A web app that opens up channels of communication between students, parents, and guidance counselors using a private online chat room. Guidance counselors will be able to provide better care to large amounts of students. Students have the choice to communicate anonymously in the event that they are uncomfortable discussing sensitive subjects with a counselor. If the students are not comfortable messaging the counselor, then parents will have the option to communicate and use the service as well. Counsel.me additionally has an “elevate” function where students/parents can choose to take their concerns to members higher up in the school hierarchy if they do not receive a response from their initial message. This encourages prompt results to problems being addressed. We are confident that our project can compete in the Social Impact category.

How we built it

The main facing website was built with HTML/CSS/Javascript. The counselling chat app was developed using React.js, Express.js, and Webpack, using socket.io for the chat backend system and express.js to handle chat messages and user logins.

Challenges we ran into

We experienced some difficulty deploying the app to the Azure platform. We were unable to successfully port the chat server and client system to utilize a single port and backend system for Azure App Services.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For several of us this Hackathon was our first and we are proud to even have a project to present. We believe that the idea we have can make a positive impact on students and counselors alike; making for a healthier environment overall throughout school communities.

What we learned

Preparation for the hackathon could have played a greater impact in ensuring a successful product. However, we have also learned a great deal about different web technologies, and gained valuable experience in the creation and management of Azure App and VM services.

What's next for Counsel.me

For our webapp, we plan to implement a secure verification system using the ID given to school counselors by the American counseling association. This would prevent a swarm of fake/unverified counselors from utilizing the service. We also, plan to implement a storage page that would maintain all complaints that have been created and sent by the parent/student that is currently logged into the page. These complaints would have a timer that would keep track of the amount of days that have passed since said complaint was made, and would allow the parent/student to elevate the complaint to a higher level of authority who might address the problem. The levels of elevation are counselor -> principal -> superintendent. This would allow unaddressed complaints to garner more attention and hopefully pressure counselor’s to be more responsive in addressing problems.

Built With

Submitted to

TartanHacks 2019

Created by

I created the backend and frontend for the Counsel.me chat application, built using React.js, Express.js, Webpack, and Socket.io. The chat app provides a direct line from counselors to students in order to facilitate discussion and allow counselors to have a wider reach in understaffed schools.

ayliu
I worked on trying to set up a servlet for our .html pages that would relay the information to our servers and store that on our backend cloud service, azure in this case. The work for the servlet was, however, not put into the final project as there was too much set up to be done during the time of the hackathon to actually integrate the code I had into the webapp. I also assisted with the frontend of our webapp with HTML support and I attempted to add react to our web pages and relay the information given through our forms to our server.

yourboyoch
I designed the entire website and logo in html and css using a minimalistic approach. The simplicity of the website allows users to understand the essence of the project without any kind of distraction. Counsel.Me is a service meant to allow counselors to connect with their students in a fast, efficient, and effective manner. By making it a digital platform, we are trying to help schools that are understaffed and cannot physically make appointments to meet every student connect with everyone. The service also allows for parents to directly reach out to counselors to address concerns they may have about their student.

Ashmita Rajkumar
Patrick Fullerton

Updates

ayliu started this project — Feb 09, 2019 04:06 PM EST

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