OfficeMinutes

Inspiration

With most of us being CS majors, we have a lot of experience with CS OH Hours. Two of us are TAs and all of us attend office hours regularly. Thinking about the current in-person OH system, we found a lot of pain points about how the queue is managed and decided to try and improve the experience for both students and TAs. Our problem statement is that current OH systems such as Piazza and whiteboards at OH spaces are unreliable and inefficient, posing challenges for TAs to manage OH effectively. Consequently, students are deprived of the optimal support necessary for success in their homework and projects, limiting their learning outcomes.

What it does

OfficeMinutes is a minimal and intuitive system that allows students to find groups in OH sessions that are covering the same issue that they're having. TAs have more control over the OH session with pre-assigning tags that they believe students will encounter. Students will have a better experience by being able to gauge the help they received from a TA and add any feedback that TAs can see before they help a student. Both views are split and catered to students and TAs where private 1-on-1 session are hidden from other students but revealed to the TAs.

How we built it

We built a backend using socket.io to and Express have realtime updates for each user by maintaining a state of the current OH system with all the questions, TAs on duty, and tags that may be helpful to students to all users. We used NextJS, Typescript, and TailwindCSS to streamline the control of the OH state.

Challenges we ran into

A tricky bug we encountered was working with Socket.io (http://Socket.io). Since this is a technology we have never used before, ...

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of being able to integrate a new server-side technology that is socket.io and also the logic and flow state of the application on the frontend side. There were a lot of little edge cases like different modal tags and different modals based on user input.

What we learned

We learned how to meet the middle ground of our ideas and see which is feasible with the time that we have. We learned new technology and the importance of planning over coding as it serves to establish a more straightforward and simple progression.

What's next for OfficeMinutes

• Implementing a secure system for user authentication to courses and access to OH sessions
• Allowing students to receive SMS or audio updates when they are at the top of the queue
• Adding a map view so TAs can easily find students
• Analytics for TAs to predict demand and identify problem spots and average wait time on queue

Built With

• mongodb
• nextjs
• prisma
• socket.io
• tailwindcss
• typescript