e{du}motion

Foster metacognition during learning processes from a journaling and emotional state framework.

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Inspiration

 We decided to move forward with the education track, realizing that we were all interested in improving education. We initially started e{du}motion as a service intended for ECS majors at UC Davis. Students would select the classes they are registered for, and log their emotional journey throughout the class. They could then share their experiences and help others understand that when ECS60 gets them frustrated and feeling hopeless, they are not alone.

What it does

e{du}motion is a database-driven web application where unique users can log their experiences and emotions during specified learning "sessions." These sessions could be time spent studying for an exam, attending lecture, or perhaps working on an assignment. Students are encouraged to log "activities," significant events throughout the process such as getting stuck, getting an idea, or making a breakthrough. At that point, students interact with the website to log an emotional state and a short description of the event. They can later review their emotional progress throughout a day, a week, or an academic term through the "insight" tab, which displays graphical representations of their progress. This grants students powerful understanding into which study experiences went well for them and which did not. This grants students a powerful tool for metacognition, for improving their own personal learning process and finding the study habits that lead them to success.

How we built it

e{du}motion has a backend consisting of a SQL database with two tables--one for unique users and another for experiences logged. PHP is used to query and communicate between the database and our JavaScript. As a web application, e{du}motion is primarily built on HTML5 and CSS3. It is hosted on a webhost one of our members had before, and using a domain name we got from domainnames.com. The graphs are from Chartist, a JavaScript charting library that can be found at: https://github.com/gionkunz/chartist-js.

Challenges we ran into

Each of us had little prior experience with web development and SQL, and no PHP experience whatsoever. Web functionality was difficult, as was implementing the graphs for the "insight" portion. The hardest part of the process, however, was putting the pieces together--finding a way to communicate with the database that drives our application. At first, we were also struggling with coming up with an idea. When we thought of e{du}motion, however, we all got pretty excited and just got right to work learning what we could.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learned an immense amount from the process of creating this website. From PHP to Git to JavaScript functionality, we all gained some valuable new skills and came out with a product we can be proud of. Moreover, we're all very excited to continue work on e{du}motion and refine it even more.

What we learned

PHP, Github, Java, Full-stack development, pretty much everything related to our process was something new for each of us, and we gained some really great skills from it.

What's next for e{du}motion

We intend to continue working on it, sharpening and refining the various bits of functionality left to do. Even further down the line, we'd like to implement a picture-taking mechanism where users take a picture of their face at each significant event. We would then apply a machine learning visualization algorithm to analyze the picture and match it to the emotion the user logs. With time and training, we'd like our algorithm to be able to predict the user's emotion from their picture, and provide more powerful feedback in the insights portion.
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