EnQuire

Tired of waiting desperately for a response from your professor five minutes before your test is due? EnQuire makes the process of exam Q&As simple, for both students and instructors.

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Inspiration

We wanted to build a system that allows students to easily ask professors and TAs questions during exams. One inconvenient aspect of remote education is the fact that many classes do not offer an easy way for students to contact professors and/or TAs during exams. For example, we may have to email them in the middle of the test, only to receive a reply half an hour after submitting our exams. Some classes use the built-in chat in applications like Zoom or forum-style platforms like Piazza, but these are not designed with streamlined exam Q&As in mind. We don't want to worry about accidentally sending a private question to everyone in the Zoom chat, and the general nature of a Piazza class may lead to distractions and confusions. The aim of our project, EnQuire, is to create a platform for Q&As that is specific to exams and makes question asking easy for students and question answering simple for instructors.

What it does

EnQuire (Exam Time Quick Response) is a platform designed for streamlined Q&As during exam time. Users create an account and log in as either a student or an instructor. Instructors (i.e. professors, TAs) can set up an exam space for the exam. After logging in and entering the exam ID provided by the instructor, students are able to ask questions about the exam. Instructors are notified of new questions, and can click on a question to answer it. Instructors are able to see questions asked by all students; students can see their own questions. There is also a one-on-one chat feature for more specific or involved questions.

How we built it

We used Bootstrap JavaScript/CSS/HTML as template for most of the formatting of our project. We combined Python and HTML through Flask to make our web app interactive, and stored data in a local SQLite database.

Challenges we ran into

The most difficult step was beginning the project and researching the most suitable frameworks to use. Challenges included setting up navigation between various pages, installing different programs and versions of programs that sometimes were incompatible, and learning to piece together multiple frameworks, languages, and libraries.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so happy to have made so much progress in the project with limited experience, and in the process we have learned very much.

What we learned

Servers. HTTP methods such as POST and GET. New programs and resources. Architecture of live websites. Connecting various frameworks and templates. Team communication.

What's next for EnQuire

We hope to more thoroughly test all the functionalities of EnQuire, and make the interface for question asking and answering more user-friendly. We want to implement an Announcements feature so that important questions can be pinned at the top of the page and shown to all students. We also hope to improve our one-on-one private chatting feature so that it is easier to navigate, potentially adding a queue so that students get matched with instructors in a systematic way.

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