block-quote editor
homepage
solar system
short answer
multiple choice

About EngagEd

Our Inspiration

Our inspiration for EngagEd came from a two-fold frustration with the exclusivity of teaching and inaccessibility of learning. We all know people with hidden talents that have prompted us to wonder, "Why didn't you tell me about this before?!" (Especially at Stanford!) Yet, barriers to teaching remain high. Many institutions don't care about our skills. Hopeful professors must toil through the often-discriminatory ivory tower, and school teachers perpetually face poor working conditions. While sites like Coursera are impressive, their content is sharply limited by what their operators deem important, and universities have a marked interest in not teaching outsiders as rigorously as they do for their own students. However, we believe that each and every human has a valuable ability or experiences worth sharing, and that there is a teacher in all of us. We hope to unlock that teacher in every human soul: through EngagEd, we want to not only provide aspiring educators with a platform to reach anyone, but also the ability to customize their teaching platform as they see fit.

Simultaneously, as students, we find current online learning options lacking in both quality and breadth. Little needs to be said about Zoom except that the first few weeks of online class at Stanford were horrendous. At the heart of the issue is user control over the learning experience: with Zoom, one must learn at the pace of the lecturer. With EngagEd, we want users to have more control over how they learn: they can go fast, slow, interact with problems and re-read whatever they need. Additionally, as a result of our democratic approach to teaching, users will gain access to the vast expanses of knowledge often ignored by academic and elite institutions. Be it fixing a car or learning to write a unicycle, we want people to find dedicated teachers for skills that establishments find unworthy of teaching.

What it Does

For content creators, we have an easy-to-use webpage creator. Not only is it modeled off standard text editors for ease of use, it carries functionalities such as adding short-answer and multiple-choice questions specifically tailored for interactive teaching.

For learners, they can freely access a "Browse Courses" page, where they can view different available classes, their instructors and their ratings.

How we Built EngagEd

As a website, the bulk of EngagEd was done through programming JavaScript, HTML and CSS; backend programming was done through Express. Given that all three of us had little or no experience with web development before, we had to also make extensive use of existing code online. Namely, we used Quill, a sleek online text editor, and modified it to have extra functions such as short-answer and multiple-choice questions, and we also found code for website templates that aided our design.

Challenges we Ran Into

Given our limited experience with web development, the entire process was pretty excruciating. Much of our time was spent on learning JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Our greatest challenge was figuring out how to get Quill to accept modified functions. Here, we have to thank the organizers; it would have been very difficult to accomplish adding custom functions without the help of TreeHack mentors. Integration was also a huge difficulty: it took a huge amount of effort to hook up the text editor so that it would properly render the learner view of the created webpage.

Accomplishments That We Are Proud Of

Most importantly, we are proud of creating a product we actually care about! This website is something we would be happy to continue improving upon. We are also particularly proud that we were able to successfully integrate all the different components of our website, especially given our limited experience. Finally, I think we are all happy that we learned so much. We all came out of this hackathon with a much stronger understanding of programming languages for web development (and an appreciation for its difficulty).

What we learned

Obviously, our technical competency in web development grew in leaps and bounds. We also learned some more basic yet important skills, such as effectively using GitHub and researching code that can be helpful. Last but not least, we grew to learn how to work as a team, synergize our thoughts and divvy up work.

What's next for EngagEd

Most importantly, we'd like to add more functions to aid educators. We could add a live streaming component for people to interact live with their students, and also give teachers the ability to create multiple subpages for their own class. Allowing teachers to aestheticize their class with banners and different color schemes could help them customize their teaching even more to their own liking. Additionally, we're considering transitioning the "Browse Courses'' page to a search engine, so that students can more accurately search through a wider range of content.