GetHelp

Inspiration

One of the biggest challenges in learning is getting help on homework problems. There are plenty of good online learning resources (youtube, khans academy, course era), but it's not so simple when you want to apply those higher level concepts on specific questions. Teachers are not always free to answer you questions and it's certainly not easy to find the solution process online. The supply and demand are clearly unbalanced - with way more students needing help than the number of teachers we have. So I have an idea for GetHelp - let everyone help you with homework questions.

What it does

Essentially, we want to unlock the possibility of getting homework help whenever and whereever you need it. And in order to do this, we want to empower everyone to become a teacher.

The way I imagine it is lets say Jenny is working on her trig homework at the library and she comes across this unusual question on cosine. She has no clue what to do so she takes out her phone, opens GetHelp, and takes a picture of the problem. Meanwhile, Jack is using the app on his way home. He sees Jenny's problem and wants to help. He writes the solution down on a piece of paper and takes a picture of it with the app. Jenny gets a notification and sees the solution. She is still a bit unclear of the process so she initiated a chat in the app where she can get real-time tutoring from Jack, if he's free to do so.

The ideal end state of the app would be able to support both real-time tutoring help and off-line crowdsourced way to find solutions. I think both are important in different ways.

How I built it

We decided to use ReactNative and Parse to build this GetHelp on iphone.

Challenges I ran into

Writing react code for mobile development is surprising really smooth and we ran into way fewer technical problems than we expected. However, Parse has extremely poor support for image upload with ReactNative. Parse also isn't the most intuitive way of thinking about data relations. We spent a good amount of time trying to implement image upload with Parse but ended up giving up because of a lack of feature. Instead, we pivoted and implemented a separate image upload server in Flask.