Writing seminar is a course that students at Penn are required to take. In this course, we read various articles and have to write lengthy outlines which include looking for specific details to support our arguments. Due to the sheer number of outlines we have to write, writing seminar becomes a course known for its tedious workload. We drew inspiration from this prevalent problem and saw that if we could create outlines more easily, it would save students a lot of time.
Our journey began with the creation of a simple web application. Here, users can paste text that they are reading from into the left column and use their mouse to highlight important ideas from the text itself. Upon pressing y (for yellow) or g (for green), it will transfer that text over to a text editor on the right side and highlight it in the corresponding color in the original text as well. The text editor allows for creating indented bullets by pressing control and ~. We planned to extend our application by having features that allow exporting the text into a Google Doc as well as a chrome extension so instead of visiting the website every time, they can just have the extension and concurrently outline on top of the website they are already on.
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