Inspiration
Online Office Hours with long waits have been a norm since the pandemic. We could be sitting in front of zoom, not wanting to miss our turn, for hours at a time.
What it does
Our group wanted to create a webpage service that would make the OH queue visible for all attendees, allowing students to see what their wait time looks like approximately according to the number of students waiting in front of you in the queue. The webpage would also be sending text messages/email notifications to the next participant, so students would be able to engage in other activities while waiting and don’t have to worry about missing out on their turns. In addition, there’s also a chat box feature for students currently waiting in the queue to help each other figure out their problems.
How we built it
We used HTML, JS, JSON, and jQuery for both the front end design and the chrome extension, as well as CSS for the frontend. We also used GitHub to collaborate and share our code with each other.
Challenges we ran into
One of the challenges we encountered is the back-end development. We would like to see the student information inserted to our mySQL database when the user clicks on the submit button. However, even if the database works well when we are testing on a separate HTML form , our database connection is not successful when we try to integrate the front end with the back end. In the future, we are going to upgrade it to a project that supports more functions and manages the student information in the database.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to integrate a functioning group chat as well as create a cohesive front end design. We are also proud of the idea behind our project, and that we were able to add our own custom chrome extension to our Google Chrome web browser.
What we learned
We learned the basics of creating a new chrome extension as well as PHP and other cloud based data bases.
What's next for OH Helper
Deploying it to website and making a functional backend! We also want to add in Authorization for google API server to access client google calendars.
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