Paragon

Feel like your math skills are diminishing? Exercise your pink memory muscle using Paragon!

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Inspiration

In light of COVID-19, the entire nation is filled with the cries of parents who hate mathematics struggling to home-school their children. An even less shocking revelation is that the United States does not invest sufficient resources toward education. Consequently, children that attend schools that are not well-funded tend to lack the basic fundamentals of a subject such as mathematics, which results in an endless production cycle of below-average test scores. In fact, according to thebalance.com, the math skills of students across the nation have remained stagnant since at least 2000. This is reflected by the U.S. mathematics test scores resulting well below the global average. Globally, the U.S. is ranked 38th in terms of mathematics. Looking at all of these issues, our team was inspired to create a solution that will not only help children improve their mathematical abilities and train them to process information at a higher rate, but also improve the standard of education starting from the fundamentals. To do this, we looked toward other websites such as Math Dojo and Khan Academy as inspiration for the setup of our project.

What it does

Paragon is a website where students can challenge themselves and their friends to answer as many questions as they can correctly within a time frame of sixty seconds. This website offers different aspects of mathematics such as: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and exponents. No matter what subject they choose, students can put their thinking abilities to the test and improve their mathematical skills with the high-paced structure of Paragon.

How we built it

Using the IDE Visual Studio Code, we coded the website by utilizing Javascript, HTML, and CSS. For the background of the website, we took advantage of the graphic design platform known as Canva and put our own creative twist to the background to make it fit with the sleek yet playful aesthetic we set ourselves to achieve. For the video itself we utilized Adobe Premiere Pro with royalty free music and stock footage both free for commercial use.

Challenges we ran into

All of our team members do not use the same coding languages, so we had to compromise when creating the project and split our roles accordingly. At one point, we even struggled to place the background image because of a few barely noticeable syntax errors. Individually, we all had our own challenges we had to overcome depending on our knowledge of the different languages ranging from inexperienced to advanced.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of ourselves for looking at a problem affecting our nation and coming up with and creating an accessible solution within a matter of days as a highly diverse group of strangers turned team-mates. Whether it be learning two programming languages in a matter of days or just fixing an error message after hours of trying, each of us also had our own accomplishments that allowed this project to come into fruition.

What we learned

The importance of communication is a major lesson we learned. From the beginning, the team-members with less experience made it very clear that this is their first hackathon and we listened to each other with patience, guided each other through the process, and never hesitated to ask each other questions to ensure our own growth. This taught us the valuable skill of communicating which is needed not only in the workplace, but also in life. All of us also learned about different aspects of computer science, whether it be new languages and how to create projects with them or even just learning from our own mistakes.

What's next for Paragon

We want to realize this project and implement free resources for students (and their parents) such as lessons/lesson plans, YouTube videos that go over each subject, and even expand the subjects to encompass each individual grade level starting from first grade going all the way into eighth grade.

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