Noctua [Team #56]

Home page
Screenshot of math lessons page
Resources page, where you can login to chat with other students and your mentor
The original rough draft of what one of the pages would look like

Inspiration

When trying to think of more specific topics within the Hackathon topic (Women Empowerment and Diversity and Inclusion) we wanted to deal with something big and something important. As a group we all really liked the idea of going into something education related. While we kinda wanted to dive into helping young girls feel empowered, we noticed how rarely anyone talks about helping the many older women who weren't able to complete their education. We were inspired to think of something that could help this group feel more empowered and included into society.

What it does

Allows women unable to complete their education to gain skills in math and reading , two of the main areas necessary to include oneself in the job market and gain independence. The aim is to empower women by giving them the resources needed to complete education. The platforms self-paced lessons are lots of content in audio and video format, to make it easier for those with lower literacy rates to participate, including everyone we can.

How we built it

We used Repl.it to code a website with HTML, CSS and JavaScript (using the Jquery library).

Challenges we ran into

We had some trouble deciding what the platform would contain, since we had tons of ideas. We also struggled a little with the Jquery bits. The greatest moment of panic was when all our CSS went wacky and the website simply didn't look like what we wanted it too. Fortunately, that disappeared after a while. We were unable to identify what caused it but its not a problem anymore.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the final visual of the site. We wanted something that was intuitive to navigate, since we assumed that a great deal of our audience would be there to learn, so huge chunks of text with big words weren't going to be a good idea, neither a complex user interface. We ended up coming up with the idea of placing audio buttons, which are now widely recognized even without reading skills, on every piece of text so the women using the platform can listen when they are confused. The final look was also pretty clean, which was very satisfying. Overall, we are proud of thinking of a solution that could help change the lives of people.

What we learned

We expanded on our coding skills, seeing as most members in our group were new to coding. We also learned a lot about creating applications and how your target audience ends up impacting your final product. We learned that making something for someone means you think of their needs, not your interests. Also, we learned a lot about each other and became closer while working as a team. We learned how to organize efficiently our time and tasks to guarantee maximum productivity.

What's next for Noctua

We would like to implement other language options in order to make it accessible for a wider public. Furthermore, we intend to develop an app to make it more mobile friendly as well as enable people to access some of the content without wi-fi connection. Finding a way of giving out hardware or at least making it more accessible to women without their own or a public location with computers and internet (eg. a library) could help make this project reach even more people.