Inspiration
I'm always left frustrated when trying to find the answer to a question I have at school. The responses are always too generic and people use jargon that I can never understand! The next day I go into school with an answer I copied from a friend with no idea how he got the answer. Online there are tons of resources to help me with my learning, but they are never specific! Khan Academy, The Student Room and simply searching Google are too mundane. The best way I learn is by sitting down with a teacher at school, notepad and pen in hand, and going through my question step-by-step. That's when I had the idea to recreate this experience LIVE on the web so students can collaborate to solve problems, but more importantly, understand how they solve for them in the future.
What it does
helpr is a free peer-to-peer visual learning platform where students can share LIVE interactive whiteboard sessions with each other to solve problems, and understand how they solve them for the future.
How we built it
On the front end, our team used HTML and CSS to create a friendly and clear user-interface. On the back end, we used node.js, socket.io and express.js to provide a smooth user experience. Through efficient and clean code, we tried to recreate a physical whiteboard within a browser, and a clear chat-box to enhance user communications.
Challenges we ran into
Throughout the coding of our project, we encountered many bugs, many of which related to the shared whiteboard. We had two principal issues. Firstly, the drawing output on the canvas was not corresponding to the location we clicked on. Over many stressful hours we were able to find the problem. It happened to be to do with the fact that we were making our canvas responsive in CSS. Luca then converted this into Javascript and used an algorithm for plotting points depending on canvas size.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Recreating a physical whiteboard experience online! We're proud that our interactive whiteboard is communicative and can shared by students within a LIVE session. Also, the fact that we were able to conquer the challenges we faced in our project is something that got us jumping up and down at points.
What we learned
From this hackathon, not only did we learn more about different programming languages, but how to efficiently work together on the same project. Research into our field has proven to be essential. We have learnt that without a clear goal, your users won't know your goal, and then you have no project! Most importantly, we have learnt that planning is KEY.
What's next for helpr
Initially, we hope to build a large user base in the 11-18 age group (secondary school students and sixth formers). We'll use targeted adverts on social networks (Facebook and Twitter, mainly) to reach our audience. This would begin in English speaking countries; access to the American market (where there are approximately forty million children and teenagers in our target demographic, and many home-schooled children for whom this service could be highly useful) is one of our aims. With a large user base, we will start by operating a free, ad-based revenue model, which will give us the funds to invest in paid operations. We will try to sell a session-planning system where teachers can organise sessions with students at particular times. Within the UK, there are 3268 secondary schools; in America there are approximately 24,000. A small fraction of this market could secure us a sizeable revenue stream. In terms of features, we will add mathematical symbols that can be added from a drag-and-drop bar, function plotting, shapes, and a reputation system for helpers.
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