Inspiration
We chose to work on the DOE’s pitch due to our experiences in school. All members of the team are in either high school or college and we know what it’s like to feel limited by our resources. While there are many teachers that have supplies for class use, there are also those that don’t. We believe that a teacher and their studentsʻ learning experiences should not be limited because of insufficient materials.
Haʻāwi provides teachers in the state of the Hawaiʻi the opportunity to share resources with each other through a user-friendly mobile app. Hawaiʻi is a small state composed of even smaller islands, making sharing physical resources easy. With Haʻāwi, teachers will be able share resources with each other both in person and online.
What it does
Although sharing can be done via email, Haʻāwi goes beyond the typical teacherʻs email pool by creating an engaging online community, encouraging teachers to make new connections and help those in need (or request help). The app does so by allowing teachers to post requests/offers to an interactive feed, offer classroom strategies in forums, and socialize through our messenger.
How we built it
Our tech stack can be found near the bottom of the page. Notably, we built the app using Express, a web application platform for Node.js, which would allow us to easily develop the back end of our application. However, the back end remains a part of our stretch goals.
Our team tried to maintain online communication daily to ensure progress on the app. We also split up interfaces and features (front-end) and server-side functionality (back-end) among the members.
Challenges we ran into
Since our team consists of high school and college students, our biggest challenge was finding the time to work on the application during our busy schedules.
Accomplishments
Although we were unable to incorporate a back end, our team is satisfied with the overall design and app that we produced.
What we learned
As we created our application, our team was able to improve our communication skills. Effectively communicating with one another was essential for us to successfully complete our application. As for the technical aspects of this project, our team learned how to integrate new tech stack into our application such as bootstrap. An honorable mention would be VScode; although it is a text editor, some of our members were amazed by how easy it was to debug and fix git merge conflicts. In the end, our members were able to gain more experience and ultimately improve their programming skills.
What's next for Ha’āwi
The end of this HACC will not be the end of the app. Team No-Internet is determined to fully develop Haʻāwi in the near future. We want to develop Haʻāwi further because we donʻt want our idea to sit in a corner and collect dust; weʻd like to help teachers throughout Hawaiʻi form a close-knit community where lacking supplies is less of a problem.
In order to do so, we intend to fully integrate a back-end and improve existing features. Our first step after building a full stack app is to test it with teachers at Waipahu High School. Hopefully, our app will be able to reach many users beyond that.
Testing the App
If youʻd like to run our app, we suggest using the Chrome Browser so you can open the Dev Tools (Ctrl+Shift+I).
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