LecNotes

Inspiration

Four Hack-MIT students sit forlornly around a small picnic table in the shadow of the Z-Center. The afternoon light shines golden on their faces- time is ticking and inspiration hasn't hit. First, there was Shitty Uber, in which dog walkers could leave behind their dog's poop to be picked up by someone else for a small charge. Then, there was Pandora's Box, in which Pandora would play exclusively songs that you would hate to listen to. But as we took a quick break, wilting in the sun as we scrolled through our phones, we noticed something. Skim through any student's camera roll and you'll find an odd melange of memes, school dance photographs, random assignments, and the occasional precious lecture slide snapped in the nick of time as a teacher hustled through the most critical parts of the lecture. Flash forward in time to a week before the exam- okay, the night before the exam. A sleep-deprived student frantically scrolls through their chronologically-ordered camera roll, trying to suss out that one perfect lecture summary picture taken three or four or maybe five weeks ago. Wouldn't it be nice if there was an app to store your academics-related pictures far away from the clutter and quagmire of real life?

What it does

The app opens on a camera for ease of capturing lecture slides or whiteboard images before a lecturer moves on. The app takes user input to save the image by the class that it was taken in. The app displays photographs taken by the user not by date but by the class that they are relevant to.

How we built it

We developed an app using Swift for iOS devices. We relied entirely on our own writing, using no API's or libraries. Our app was tested by loading the app onto our own Apple devices.

Challenges we ran into

Several challenges that we ran into were storing photographs in persistent data directories while avoiding the camera roll, since we aimed to keep academic photographs in the app only.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we were able to come up with a practical idea in our first-ever hackathon! We're also excited that we were able to develop an app, despite having no prior experience in Swift.

What we learned

We learned to collaborate as a team in both technical and creative challenges. As a team, we learned swift and developed a simple app with it. Moreover, we learned that hacking comes with a diverse set of challenges and surprises that proved to be fun in a whole new way.

What's next for lecnotes

We'd like to synchronize lecnotes with MIT firehose and MIT's classroom database so that the app can determine what class a student's photographs belong to based on the time and location of the picture. We would also like to establish a community of users to share high-quality and important images with their classmates across recitation sections and lecturers.

Built With

• swift