Inspiration
So many students are passionate about subjects but are unable to truly explore them because they are not offered at school.
What it does
WE ARE COMPETING IN THE EDUCATION AND SOCIAL GOOD CATEGORIES. Our website is a way for younger students and high schoolers to connect academically. There are so many kids in NYC who want to learn about a subject but are unable to due to financial reasons. Extra Education takes applications from high school students that are interested in specific subjects and want to gain community service hours. Once a high schooler’s application has been approved and chosen, they are connected with other high schoolers in the area that are also interested in teaching those subjects. Those high schoolers create a curriculum that must be approved and plan different engaging activities. The lessons are taught and designed by knowledgeable high schoolers who are dedicated to helping their community. Extra Education connects groups of high school students in the same area who are interested in teaching a specific subject or skill. Once connected, students design an engaging curriculum that is usually taught weekly. In exchange, these high school students gain community service hours. Parents or guardians of an elementary to middle school student can sign up for a lesson free of charge. What makes Extra Education so versatile is the different topics that can be taught and the locations where a lesson can be held. Lessons are held all throughout the five boroughs at public educational spots (i.e., the numerous NY Public Libraries) or even parks or museums. This allows all students to access the education that they want. Extra Education is not a tutoring service but instead an organization that hosts lessons that truly educate students. Programs offered are not just academic, like coding or writing, but are also life skills, like sewing, language, and more. The goal of Extra Education is to provide ambitious young students with cost-free opportunities to learn about the things they love.
How we built it
We mainly used HTML and CSS to build and design the website. We first planned it out on paper by drawing it. We split our webpage up into many sections using divs and added different elements onto the page inside those divs to contain them effectively.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into numerous challenges. We first struggled with the IDE we used, Visual Studio. It was foreign to us and we continue to run into problems with it. We struggled with HTML because we were not as knowledgeable about its inner workings and has not used it extensively.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we were able to complete our project within the given time frame during our first ever hackathon, and that we were able to bring our drawn out website plan to life through code.
What we learned
This is our first hackathon, we are beginners. While coding, we learned about how to use divs to split up our webpages into different sections, how to position items on a relative and absolute basis, use percentages of a container to make sure that our website can scale no matter the platform, and how to link webpages together to form a coherent website. In addition, we gained valuable skills such as how to utilize resources on the internet to improve our code, how to map out a long term project so it can be completed in manageable steps, and effective time management for time-constrained projects.
What's next for Extra Education
In the future, we will improve this project by connecting it to a database so that users can create an account and start or register for courses. Also, we would add geolocation features so that users could browse courses based on proximity, so lessons can be more accessible to everyone.
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