Inquiry

Bringing anxiety-free, in-person, student-teacher interactions to the classroom via live reactions and anonymous messages straight to your teacher's display.

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Inspiration

At Owlhacks, guest speaker Stephanie Fiore gave an inspiring talk on inclusivity and equity in education. She emphasized how the pandemic gave a voice to many diverse groups of people, such as people with anxiety, neurodiversity, ESL, and/or disabilities. Zoom allowed these people to freely ask questions, take time to form their thoughts, and freely voice their opinions without fear of public opinion. With Inquiry, we bring these virtual lecture advantages to the real world.

What it does

Inquiry is a multi-platform real-time messaging and reaction app. The virtual advantage of education, as mentioned before, was the ability to open up without fear of public opinion. Many students struggle with anxiety from this, and the purpose of Inquiry is to solve this. Inquiry allows students to connect to a class from a web browser and send reactions and messages straight to their teacher/professor's display. Inquiry also allows for upvoting of questions, allowing instructors to gauge how common a question is.

How we built it

Inquiry was built as two separate applications, a web app, and a desktop app. The web app was created in Reactjs and Nextjs. The desktop app was created with Electronjs and Reactjs, with Vite working to bridge the gap between the frameworks. Inquiry uses Supabase as a database for chat messages, reactions, classes, and user auth.

Challenges we ran into

The primary challenge we faced was getting Electron to work with React. React and Electron both work as applications, with React being web and Electron being desktop, so multi-processing is required. A majority of the hackathon was spent figuring out how to do this. Vite was the end result of our struggles. With using such a large tech stack came learning challenges. Learning all of the new frameworks and database systems in such a short amount of time was challenging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to communicate between systems and being able to

What we learned

We both learned Electronjs and Supabase and improved our experience with web development.

What's next for Inquiry

Simplifying interactions and gamifying in-class participation to engage students more.

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