Inspiration
As a result of COVID-19, millions of classrooms have switched to an online format. Under these new circumstances, teachers have been forced to adopt online learning strategies in order to simulate a classroom environment. With very little time, teachers have fallen behind in creating lesson plans.
What it does
In order to address the time crunch faced by teachers, we have designed an automated tool for teachers called "LessonPlanner". LessonPlanner builds a custom presentation around a user-specified search query. The tool scrapes the internet for sources related to the search query and compiles a powerpoint presentation around it. This allows teachers to quickly create a detailed lesson plan for their class and thus save time.
How we built it
We built this tool using Flask. Our Flask app receives a query, specified by the user, then scrapes the web for sites with information related to the query. The scraped information is then compiled into a powerpoint presentation slide by slide. Our app scrapes information so that each slide contains only information relevant to the topic of the slide.
Challenges we faced
One major challenge we faced when designing this application was creating the powerpoint presentation from the scraped data. Since the information on each slide had to cover one specific aspect of the lesson's subject, we needed to adjust the way we scraped information to account for this. This led to some difficulties with the design of the scraper, however, we were able to solve these issues by looking for specific sections of the webpage when scraping the data. Another challenge we faced was creating the web server that handled the user's requests.
What's next for Lesson Plan
Currently, LessonPlanner creates lesson plans around specific terms the teacher chooses. In the future, we aim to improve the flexibility of LessonPlanner by generating lesson plans around a specific curriculum chosen by the teacher. We also wish to improve the algorithm for generating lesson plans so that each lesson includes more engaging features, such as images.
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