Inspiration
The Inspiration for our project lecture lounge began with us imploring the idea of improving interactivity between college students and the proven effectiveness of collaborative learning. One of the many challenges that Evan, our teammate, faced at Oakland Community College is the pure lack of social interactivity throughout the school, similar to what Georges experiences at U of St Thomas coming from Syria. It can be difficult to meet new people especially when a majority of school resources have been focused more towards online classrooms with large audiences or teachers teaching 10+ classes at a time. I have yet to have a single valuable ‘Discussion’ in any online class. Thus spawned LectureLounge.com!
What it does
Lecture Lounge is a forum based social media website similar to GitHub/Reddit with an emphasis on open source knowledge and influencing discussion among peers in similar classes to influence collaborative learning and even organizing events/meetups for your local community. When logged in you are prompted for which email, username, password, school, major, and classes/categories. Within the categories are subcategories and users can create and join groups as they please! In each post there is the option to upvote, and have discussions between users.
How we built it
The website was built bottom-up using Python’s Flask web framework, MongoDB, and a bit of front-end Bootstrap JavaScript/HTML5/CSS styling, we made sure to make an emphasis on the scalability of this project and chose flask for this reason. Flask allows for simple scalability and interaction within the database server in which we selected MongoDB.
Challenges we ran into
This was all our first time attending a hackathon, with limited experience from all different areas of IT and computer science we spent a majority of the time figuring out the proper documentation within flask and using various libraries associated with the functions needed to make the website work properly and interact with the database. MongoDB was a particular challenge simply because none of us have had much experience in web development let alone creating queries from a NoSQL Database. Although we had our idea and plan laid out pretty quick, we very quickly ran into issues compiling the different versions on github and deciding/keeping track of specific roles as to which pages/area of the project was being worked on. This caused lots of time to be wasted from miscommunication.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We decided on a topic and immediately began planning, despite not having known each other prior to the hackathon. Also, to top it off we successfully were able to submit our project on time! We all were able to learn a lot from each other, with small bits of knowledge from all different areas we combined it all into one and built a functional web application.
What we learned
From building the Lecture Lounge website, we learned a variety of technical skills, including the use of the Flask framework, HTML and Bootstrap for website structure and design, and the integration of a dynamic post addition feature using Python and MongoDB. We also learned the importance of proper file organization and troubleshooting techniques when encountering issues such as the difficulty in fetching an image from the assets folder. In addition to these technical skills, we also gained valuable experience in market research and understanding the needs of our target audience, which helped guide the development of the website's features and overall mission. This project helped us improve our problem-solving skills and adaptability, as well as our ability to work as a team and effectively communicate our ideas and progress.
What's next for Lecture Lounge
In terms of next steps, one potential area for improvement would be to enhance the user experience by implementing more advanced filtering and search capabilities, such as allowing users to filter posts by college, department, or class level. Additionally, we want to integrate additional features such as a messaging system, or a rating system for posts to help increase the engagement and value of the community. Also increase the number of colleges the website is targeting, expanding the user base.
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