Hackademy

Inspiration

Over the last year and a half, the global pandemic brought upon a novel set of challenges in the education space. Out of the many challenges, our group asked 2 specific questions:

What if there was a way to get real-time feedback on physical tasks and activities even through online courses? What if you can get a fulfilling hands-on education experience online? With those questions in mind, our team strived to modernize online education and accessibility resources through hands-on learning to drive engagement in an online education platform. That’s why we made Hackademy!

What it does

Hackademy uses a motion tracking video feed that can assess whether such activities such as cutting with a knife, doing yoga, communicating in ALS, etc. are performed in the correct manner by tracking individual joints in the hand, body joints, or even facial expression in whatever relevant topic it requires. For example, when cutting ingredients with a knife, our platform, supplemented by video tutorials, makes sure you are actually performing and applying what you have learned in a correct and safe manner.

How we built it

We used the OpenCV API for the video-tracking and processed the data on python. We then connected that to the front-end using Flask and developed our web application interface using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The website itself is hosted on Microsoft Azure. We additionally used Figma prior to coding to brainstorm, ideate, and create mid-fidelity prototypes.

Challenges we ran into

Our team was not able to get our website hosted on Azure until around 3AM. Then, when we were successful with that, there was a problem in which the camera feed on our web app hosted on Azure would not pop up (mentors could not provide an immediate solution either).

Furthermore, no one on our team knew Flask beforehand, and it was crucial to connect the back-end and front-end using Flask, so there were learning curves involved

Furthermore, our intention was to implement the Visa Cybersource API into our payment system, but due to a combination of lack of time and difficulty understanding the API, we were unable to implement it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite many of the setbacks that we encountered during the hackathon, we are more than excited to share the prototype that we have come up with. Through our code and design, we have been able to implement both aesthetics and usability into our website; not only are we able to actively track movement real-time, but the technology can provide messages in relation to how the user is performing.

Our design, which was first modeled through figma, was also implemented to our website through all the difficulties and errors we encountered throughout the night. We are more than proud to present our Hackademy website and interface!

What we learned

On a technical level, some of our members learned to use Flask, and we all got familiar with the OpenCV API which none of us were familiar with.

Not only this, but we learned to utilize each member of our team’s specialties to create the best product we could. Through intense collaboration and delegation, we aided and supported each other through our endeavors and were able to see in action each member’s skill set build our product up from the ground.We also taught each other bits and pieces of our knowledge to share and strengthen the project as well.

What's next for Hackademy

We would like to expand our education categories so our platform could offer more subjects and activities. This also goes hand in hand for our next goal of wanting to increase accuracy of our data processing algorithm so it can give even more accurate feedback to our users.