Inspiration
the most recent National Center for Education Statistics data reports that out of approximately 19.9 million total college and university students in America, almost 6.9 million of them, close to 35%, are enrolled in some form of distance education for 2019. Undergraduate participation in distance education has grown to 34.5% as of 2018. The rapid increase in online learning is confirmed when one considers the fact that between 2003-2004 only 16% of undergraduates had any participation in distance education. Graduate school has the highest rate of participation in online studies. For the 2018 academic year, a full 39.8% of graduate students were enrolled in some form of distance learning. 73% of students in 2018 studying through private, for-profit institutions enrolled in distance education, 34.1% of students at public institutions the same year took online courses, and 30.4% of students at private non-profit schools enrolled in distance education.
On top of this, I being high schoolers who have the high school burden online, we have sensed the struggle not only for ourselves but for those of other peers who often come to us for help. As a result, this inspired us to create this project.
What it does
For the react native app, it connects with the Website Neeral made in order to create a comprehensive solution to this problem.
There are five main sections in the react native app:
The first section is an area where tutors can make posts for any students to require help to respond to. As a tutor I fill in several fields such as the subjects I wish to tutor, my phone number, email address, name and description and I am able to post a post. Additionally, if I choose to tutor as a volunteer I can enter Free in the costs column as well.
The second section is a help section where students having problems with certain questions can enter them or information they wish to retrieve using Wolfram Simple API. I am able to go to that page and for example enter “Who was George Washington” and a detailed answer and facts in relation to him comes up.
The third section is the courses tabs which users can use in order to find courses to either learn more or seek help via a course in order to learn more or develop that skill further. Here there are a few find pre-selected courses such as Computer Science, Data Science, Calculus 1 for options but instead I will use the custom query input where I can input a course that I might want to find and a list of courses come out of the output using ClassPert Course Search API
The fourth section is a template web app that has been embedding into the react native application, allowing us to create custom community forum page for our app effortlessly. This was created using tribe.so, which created a subdomain link which we then integrated into our app.
The fifth section is a build your own resume section. Users will answer some questions and the program will write a professionally written resume. In the future, I would like to use sentimental analysis to make sure that the tone is as accurate as can be. Each resume comes with 5 sections such as awards, experience, interests, etc. We know writing the perfect resume is tough and must be better than ever due to how many jobs have been displaced due to the pandemic; hence we chose to make the resume builder.
In the future we would also want to make an online notetaker system that tracks what the teacher is saying and writes it down in google docs this way students can refer to what the teacher said. We would also like to use tensorflow to summarize this.
How I built it
For the react native part of the application, I will break it down section by section. For the first section, I simply used Firebase as a backend which allowed a simple, easy and fast way of retrieving and pushing data to the cloud storage. This allowed me to spend time on other features, and due to my ever growing experience with firebase, this did not take too much time. I simply added a form which pushed data to firebase and when you go to the home page it refreshes and see that the cloud was updated in real time
For the second section, I used native base in order to create my UI and used Wolfram Alpha simple api, which takes in the query and then outputs an image with the results. This way the information given is maximized. The UI is again created by me where the icons are from vector-icons this time around.
For the third section, I used classpert, course search api in order to create a query system to output results of courses that are found most appealing to the user. For the user interface, I created the designs myself and I use Material-Paper library to retrieve the icons which are being used throughout the app.
For the fourth section, I used tribe.so in order to create a template forum which I then integrated into the react native app.
For the fifth section, we made a resume builder page that asks the users for answers to certain questions, then prints out a nice formatted resume.
For the 6th section, we made a comments form that users were allowed to write feedback and comments on. They would then be analyzed by our sentimental analysis model, and the feedback would be given to the user along with how strong the words used were.
I used html and css and boostrap for the webpages. We then used flask to connect it all together and pass the inputs from the forms to the resumes. We used javascript for the comment section forms and the resume builder form, and along with this we used python to make our sentimental analysis model. We used an inbuilt dataset which contained numerous reviews.
Challenges I ran into
API query bugs was a big issue in formatting back the query and how to map the data back into the UI. It took some time and made us run until the end but we were still able to complete our project and goals.
What's next for EAS-E
In the future we would also want to make an online notetaker system that tracks what the teacher is saying and writes it down in google docs this way students can refer to what the teacher said. We would also like to use tensorflow to summarize this.
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