Inspiration
We were inspired by our passion of gaining as much knowledge as possible. It's hard to know where to start when learning a skill on your own, so it can end up feeling very daunting. Our website hopes to give an organized structure for people to start their learning journey.
What it does
Our website Learning Roots would allow users to link research paper and videos that they believe best explain the topic rather than having a specific video. Other users would be able to see these links and would like or dislike any video they believe best helped them with their lesson. Our users are represented by a small acorn seed. As users gain more knowledge through every module and subject, their little seed will grow alongside them into a grand oak tree. Seeing their tree develop and our happy little mascot, Misty, will motivate the users to keep on learning.
How we built it
The front end was created using Figma. Our icons, such as the seed to oak tree, and our mascot: Misty the Cloud, were created in Adobe Illustrator. The back end code was written using the Visual Studio Code IDE with React platform.
Challenges we ran into
We came up with an idea for a project fairly quickly, but trying to figure out how to start it was a struggle, such as picking a coding language to use. We were given the advice to use MongoDB, but we struggled with understanding what it was used for and how it uses data bases. Learning how to implement Mongo and having it work alongside our other resources was also very difficult. We also ended up coding in JavaScript, which some of us haven't learned yet. When working on front end, prototyping takes a lot of trial and error which was very time consuming.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of our website design. It's interactive and looks like an inviting game to play. Our personalized drawings are even animated. We are all also very proud of being able to easily communicate with one another throughout the entire competition. Tutorials on connecting the Mongo to React were hard to follow, but it we were able to comprehend them nonetheless. Because of those tutorials, we were able to create our code from scratch. We were very ecstatic when we first connected to the data base in React. And after it all, we were able to gain a good idea of what the program is doing and how it works, which is an accomplishment on its own.
What we learned
We were able to learn how GitHub works and how to apply it, gained experience in creating and working with an in depth prototype in Figma, learned how to code in JavaScript, used React as a JavaScript extension, and understand .json files.
What's next for Learning Root
Next, we will fix our little bugs in the Figma website, such as some buttons that lead to the wrong place and our upvote/downvote buttons. Then, we want to be able to produce quizzes and questions for each learning module for our users to test their knowledge. Getting questions right will result in the tree growing larger, and possibly unlocking little outfits for Misty the Cloud.
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