ICPeerLearn

5 Ws
Exam Paper Bank
Question Bank
Original Plan
Test Database

Inspiration

Our first year has been strange and adjusting to the new normal has not been easy. With the entirety of our course being delivered remotely, we have not been able to socialize and keeping up with the pace of our course has been quite a task. Our struggles inspired us to create this web application for all students of Imperial College London to study effectively remotely and with peers, as peer learning is an important learning technique and has not been emphasised by the college.

What it does

It is a web application which allows students of Imperial College London to login or signup. They are given the chance to either create their own study group or join an existing one. Further there is an option of uploading exam papers to the "Exam Paper Bank" either from another university or the web. Students can collectively frame answers and upvote or downvote a question paper based on difficulty and relevance. Snippets from a particular question paper may be uploaded onto the "Question Bank".

How we built it

We originally split into two teams- one to setup the firebase, and one to begin working on the front-end with react. Using github has made it easy to share code between us and work simultaneously on different parts of the code.

Challenges we ran into

We initially struggled with the setup of the firebase database as we'd never used it before but we found once it was up and running we had less problems with it. Later on, we had problems getting the react.js to display properly in the browser and linking it to the firebase, as none of us had ever used this either.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As none of us had any experience with either firebase or react.js before the hackathon, we're all very proud of being able to build a skeleton project using two new frameworks. Learning new languages takes time and we've all learnt a lot about front-end development as we've never built a web-app before.

What we learned

We learnt how to set up and use firebase databases as well as integrate it into react.js code and have it interact with user input. We also learnt react.js from scratch including building components and connecting them into a coherent web-app, alongside improving our javascript.

What's next for ICPeerLearn

There's still some essential features which haven't been added so given more time we could continue to add the rest of the functionality to the web-app. We wish to expand it to other courses and possibly universities.