Learn Inplace

Homepage Design Mockup
Mood-board Inspiration

Inspiration

The cancellation of summer schools as a result of COVID-19 has impacted the learning for children in middle school. This situation is exacerbated for parents that have been laid-off, making it difficult for them to afford private tutoring for their kids. COVID-19 has also resulted in loss of community service hours for high schoolers which form an essential component of their college applications.

What it does

Learn Inplace provides a platform to connect middle schoolers that are in need of free/low-cost tutoring with high schoolers that are available to provide that low cost tutoring service in exchange for being credited volunteer hours to bolster their college applications.

How we built it

The frontend was done with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Then after the students and tutors register, their information is stored in a MongoDB database with the help of mongoose. We also used Node.js as a server and Express.js to handle our requests and routing.

Challenges we ran into

Some technical issues we had were sending the pdf and image along the routes because those are special cases that must be accounted for, and the POST request must be set specifically. In addition, connecting the tutor and student information to the backend was an issue as well. Other issues that we faced were that we were all based in different time zones and had our own schedules, so sometimes communication and syncing up our schedules were difficult. Furthermore, we worked with technologies that we were not familiar with, such as OAuth. We had to teach ourselves and research how to work with things we were unfamiliar with. We also faced an efficiency issue with oAuth sign in, where we originally iterated through 2 databases before completing sign in to verify. This was resolved by creating two separate sign in routes and passing parameterized information to the call in order to determine user type for a single database access.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were happy that we could learn new technologies and have a project that works during these trying times, in addition to working with a nonprofit!

What we learned

We learned about different databases and hosting platforms in our research. We also learned how to use MongoDB as our chosen database and Google OAuth for user login.

What's next for Learn InPlace

We have some UI/UX designers on our team from our nonprofit, so we want to integrate her designs that she just gave us. We attached some of the images to scroll through too!