Edu-Link

Edu-Link is a platform that allows students to make inquiries about different subject areas. Once the inquiry has been made, volunteer mentors can choose to accept students and set up coffee chats.

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Inspiration

We live in a society that dictates a university degree, and without one, you are deemed to not be educated. People are expected to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to learn new things and gain knowledge. With our platform, we want to make education more accessible. There are already countless sources available on Google, but this Edu-Link takes it a step further by giving people an opportunity to seek help from other living humans.

What it does

The platform at its core connects students with mentors. On the student end of the portal, an inquiry is made with a name, email, and subject area. Once submitted, the inquiry is queued amongst the others. Mentors can sign up for mentoring with their email, and pick students based on the requested subject areas. This allows people to seek help in the subject areas they are weak in, and help others in the subject areas they are strong in. Once a mentor has selected a student, both parties receive an email with

How we built it

Our EduLink web application was built from scratch with HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. Without the use of databases or back-end and server-side technologies, we were able to make a light-weight front-end application that paired different users based on interests. In order to send emails, we utilized a free, SMTP mail server. Although many useful features such as authentication are out of reach from our skill set, we are extremely proud of our first coding project.

Challenges we ran into

As first-year students, this was our first hackathon. One of us hasn't even taken a single computer science course before. Despite that, we challenged ourselves to do the competition to step outside of class learning and gain experience in applying our coding knowledge. The challenge was coordinating our limited coding knowledge to figure out a project that harnesses both of our strengths whilst providing us the opportunity to learn new libraries and APIs. In our case, we both learned to utilize the SMTP library as well as creating a clean and efficient UI for the users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest accomplishment was finishing the project. This was our first hackathon and initially were hesitant. Even when we decided on our project, we were unsure if were capable of developing and executing our ideas. Finishing the project may not sound much, but it was the cultivation of hours of research, hard work, and persistence that allowed us to develop a product that crossed out expectations.

What we learned

The greatest learning curve came with the user interface development. Neither of us were well versed in the realm of front-end development and it took time to figure out how to develop a website that was both efficient and was pleasing to the eye. We also learned to utilize some new libraries such as the SMTP library, which allowed us to add extra features to our software.

What's next for Edu-Link

Later, we wish to add a log-in system allowing for authentication and further security to the platform. We also want to include a scheduling feature that allows students and mentors to compare schedules and pick an appropriate time straight from the platform.

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