SlideSU

Inspiration: The inspiration for slideSU came from noticing that students often have questions in class but are hesitant to ask due to fear of judgment or feeling embarrassed. As I thought about it too, I realized that even during Covid there were the more extroverted learners raising their hands and voicing the chat for the more introverted and/or chat oriented learners. We have anonymous feedbacks but why not anonymous means learning. I wanted to create a way for students to engage anonymously and for professors to explore all means of education

What it does: slideSU is an anonymous questioning platform that allows students to submit questions during lectures via a generated link after a professor uploads their slides and types in their username. Once "in class", students can upvote questions they relate to so that they are prioritized for the professor to address fostering better engagement in class.

How we built it & Challenges we ran into: We built slideSU entirely using React.js and VSCode Live Share. We explored many venues of backend but due to the nature of VSCode Live Share found obstacles that otherwise weren't experienced before in solo personal endeavors (It was after 5+ hours of trying to figure it out we decided on a React loophole). One of the challenges we faced was ensuring real-time interaction between students and professors while maintaining anonymity and not having a traditional database.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of: This was all of our first hackathons and 2 of us being first years to Computer Science (coming from career changes) and the last of us being a sophomore. We are all very new to coding, so with little background, help, and time not on our side, we are definitely proud to showcase what we have learned, made and will be continuing to figure out how to code even after this hackathon is soon over! We also ended up achieving all of our main goals but also stretch goals had we had extra time!

What we learned: Through building slideSU, we learned a lot about user experience design, React.JS and its front end development side, and all in all problem solving.

What’s next for HackSU Project: The next step for slideSU is to refine its features based on professor logins so that they could have a record of their slides and anonymous questions to perhaps improve their slides for another quarter, general security for a professor that wishes to login, and general ui/ux and functionality changes adjusting to any student/professor feedback.