Drawly

Inspiration

Studying is a very mundane process. It’s repetitive, boring, and honestly difficult sometimes, especially when you’re just reading out of a book. None of us like studying by reciting terms over and over again, that’s simply not how we learn best. It’s not only just us, we’ve talked to plenty of classmates getting upset with a teacher’s teaching ways. So if that’s the case, we figured we’d build something that appeals to people like ourselves, who learn best through interactivity, but like the feeling of competitiveness at the same time.

What it does

Drawly consists of a lobby with user-selected vocabulary terms. This could be a class, your friends, or family even. Each person would get their turn to draw a randomized vocabulary word and the rest of the lobby would have to type and guess it. Once the rounds are over and a winner is declared, each individual can add terms they felt unfamiliar with to a sandbox page, where they’ll be met with definitions and resources for related topics.

How we built it

We used Javascript, HTML, CSS, Firebase, Firestore, p5.js, and most importantly teamwork to build our site :)

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into while creating our application were dealing with the real-time factor of our game, the micro-adjustments of the drawing board, and creating a cohesive and responsive web design. With all of the prevalent issues, it made it very difficult to finish our idea given our time constraint. Additionally, we also had many ideas that kept on developing because of our rampant ambition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of being able to successfully implement Firebase APIs such as Fireauth for authentication and Firestore for the database. Coming into the hackathon, we were very unfamiliar with databases, but really pushed ourselves to learn more about them. We enjoyed the struggle of trying to learn something new, and learned a lot from it. Because this hackathon was a first for most of us, we celebrated that we had the tenacity, courage, and grit, to be able to push ourselves into new environments.

What we learned

We enjoyed the many lessons we learned during this hackathon. We found that what we valued the most was having a good time with each other. This desire to connect, socialize, and enjoy learning with likeminded people, drastically improved the quality of our work. We realized that if we were going to be with one another for 2 days—collarating, learning, and experimenting—there was no reason to be scared of one another. We didn't hesitate to ask each other questions when we needed help and we soon realized we shouldn't be scared to both ask others for help and help others. We learned to not be ashamed of not knowing everything, and that it was okay to ask our mentors, fellow hackers, and friends for help. What we learned on a technical and applicable level was how to read documentation. This helps in clearing up many confusions, doubts, and questions we had about both new and old concepts.

What's next for Drawly

As for the future, we intend on finishing Drawly entirely with some additions. This means developing our real-time features even further, finalizing other features, making the application more optimal with space-time and run-time complexity, refactoring our code, and making the website more appealing. Besides finishing up aspects of our project that are already in the works, we plan to create a method to automatically recommend related resources to a vocabulary term via an AI assistant that can analyze your study patterns and create the best lessons and study times for you. In a market sense, we plan to advertise Drawly and upscale it for other schools to use as well.