Lighthouse

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Executive Summary

Inspiration

Being students ourselves, much of our inspiration came from struggles we've faced over the pandemic. With most classes and school activities taking place in virtual environments, we felt that both communication and learning were two key areas that we needed to address in our application.

What it does

Our application helps bridge the gaps in communication and learning loss - that may have begun due to the pandemic - in several ways. We deliver data analytics in the form of charts/graphs and reports; along with this, the application tracks student data and provides warnings and insights when a student seems to be experiencing learning loss or other struggles. There are communication methods integrated in the application such as a chat feature for the educators to quickly contact the students or others if necessary.

How we built it

We chose to build a web application as it would be easily accessible to everyone (with no restrictions of owning an IOS or Android device) and more versatile. Our application was built upon the React and NextJS frameworks, both relying on JavaScript. We used Firebase and Firestore to help handle the database and its operations. We used Chakra-UI for styling the application and also for responsiveness.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we ran into included finding a way to build our application with each of our skill sets as we all differed in how much we were experienced in web development and what we were experienced with. We found a middle ground by using tools that were easy to learn and splitting up the work in a way so we could all contribute effectively. Another big challenge was time; some of our ideas were hard to integrate or simply weren't feasible with the time we had. With more time, we would have been able to construct an advanced machine learning algorithm to handle the student data and provide warnings.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to produce a working website with a professional user interface. We are also proud of our idea in itself and its potential. We each also have individualized accomplishments on the tasks we were able to complete and also how much we learned from this experience.

What we learned

We learned and gained more experience with web development and each of the languages/tools that were used to build Lighthouse. We also learned more about the marketing and business side of creating and trying to launch a new technology. We each developed new skills in areas we were unfamiliar with.

What's next for Lighthouse

In the future, we hope to be able to advance Lighthouse to provide its full capabilities that we had thought of including a more advanced machine learning algorithm, and other resources. We also hope to fine tune our user interface and existing capabilities to provide improved performance.