Ingenuity

Inspiration

Our inspiration was based on the everyday functions of students, as they have a positive and free learning environment, from students being able to exchange knowledge by teaching each other. However, why can't the learning environment be incorporated into society today? Today, learning from other people is expensive and difficult, especially with the pandemic.

What it does

Ingenuity is a web platform, where users can be paired with other users with matching interests and talents to have an exchange of knowledge, without a price. During the pandemic, it is hard to learn more, excluding paid lessons that can be hard to afford. Ingenuity is completely free and only requires two users to teach each other about their own talents.

How we built it

We built this project using React JS, Next JS as the front-end, Firebase to authenticate users, and Cockroach DB to store user data.

Challenges we ran into

The largest challenge we went through was the different time zones. As half of the team was in IST and the other half was in EST, it was hard to organise meeting times to brainstorm ideas and help one another with our roles in the project. A few members in the group never worked with Next JS or Firebase, forcing members to learn quickly at a fast pace.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An accomplishment that I am proud of is completing the project. Even though it wasn’t the initial route we were planning for, we managed to finish creating this project in only 36 hours. We worked well as a team, teaching each other different concepts in coding and creating a detailed design process.

What we learned

We all learned a lot. For example, I learned to use React JS and Next JS and Figma. After completing the project, we learned how hard it could’ve been without the design process. Many things could have gotten unorganised from the work each person received to the idea of the project itself.

What's next for Ingenuity

The next steps of Ingenuity is to build a machine learning algorithm to recommend other users who would be a great match for your interests. We also plan on creating a chat feature, that once 2 users connect, they can start talking on our website, instead of using Gmail to communicate. We also face issues with accessing cockroachDB on deployment and plan to fix it so that the vercel link can work fully.