EducateUS

Inspiration

One of our group member's mother is a teacher. Having witnessed the amount of time she spent in and out of classrooms creating lesson plans, prepping for classes, and meeting with other teachers, we were inspired to create a content sharing platform to improve the efficacy of instruction.

What it does

Our platform will enable educators to share lesson plans, teaching strategies, and other resources. In addition, it will offer a place for teachers to grow their network and build a sense of community with their peers. The platform is divided into specific sections based on grade level and subjects to allow for easy access to relevant course materials.

How we built it

We used an AWS EC2 Linux AMI to host our NGINX Web Server. Our team developed the name EducateUS as a double entendre for both educating "us" as the United States as a whole. We registered the domain name "educateus.tech" using domain.com and setup the static IPs and DNS resolution necessary to associate that name with our server. The team verified our site using a certificate authority's SSL certification, in this case CloudFlare. The rest of the time was spent learning HTML, CSS, and NGINX configuration to create a demo for our idea.

Challenges we ran into

Due to time limitations and lack of prerequisite knowledge, we did not have time to implement backend functionalities. However, through the hackathon events and workshop, we learned the basics of two web development frameworks to support a future backend implementation; React and Django.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The front end UI design is very clean and straightforward. It is easy to use and understand and will provide a good foundation to build on later. The process of hosting the site and configuring the web server was new to all members, so we were more than pleased when our domain name resolved for the first time and our pages were displayed.

What we learned

Throughout the course of this hackathon, we have learned NGINX as a web server, HTML, CSS, a bit of JavaScript, React, Django, and the AWS EC2 web service. The experience working on a team of diverse educational and personal backgrounds improved all of our leadership and collaborative skills. We grew as both professionals and individuals.