Patronus #58

A multifunctional tool for parents and educators by Team Astra

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Welcome to Patronus

We created Patronus to help educators and parents create sustainable groups for their kids, either online or in person, that allows them to receive the attention they need. With Patronus they can not only view other public pods and tutors, parents and educators can create their own pod for different subjects and facilitate learning from an entirely new level.

Inspiration

As students, we realized that the current education system just isn’t cutting it. We learned from research that many parents are turning to pandemic pods. We also learned that these can be very hard to organize, self selecting, and may worsen inequality due to only some having the resources and capability to organize and manage these pods

What it does

Patronus aims to make pandemic pods accessible, safe, and easy to organize for everybody. We provide many features to do this:

Temperature tracking: Once a pod is created, members of the pod can post what their temperature is for the day if it is in person. This allows other members of the pod to see it as well to keep pods safe.

Goals: In the beginning of the day the head parent/tutor can post what are the goals for the day. At the end of the day, they can post what they accomplished along with any other comments that they want to inform the other members of the pod.

Information: When a pod is created, information about the students is stored in the database. This can be viewed from the dashboard which helps the tutor know what to teach.

Find a tutor: In Patronus, tutors can post that they are willing to teach a pod and they can specify any timings or areas. Parents can contact them externally and add them to their pod.

Zoom codes: We all know the struggle of not being able to find the zoom code/link(at least I do). Patronus simplifies that by providing a dedicated place for the code/link. In the dashboard for the pod, there is a dedicated spot to post zoom links.

Finding a pod: When a pod is created, it can be public or private. If it is public, other users can see some pod information such as contact, location, and name and contact them externally.

Chatbot: In addition, we made a chatbot to answer common questions about Patronus and COVID-19. The chatbot can also answer any questions about education that potential users may have and helps with set up.

How we built it

We built the initial Patronus website using HTML/CS/JS as well as Bootstrap for styling aspects. We also used PHPMyAdmin/MySQL/ and Apache to create the database. We used separate tables to compile the inputted data from HTML forms. We built the chatbot using JS logic and Text 2 Speech API. Overall, we all learned how to build something new during this hackathon and had a great time learning!

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some challenges during this hackathon, some of them due to all of us learning new things.

Manya There were some problems with the chatbot logic within the javascript code. I had looked through the code for the syntax error but we couldn’t find it and the code kept stopping. At the end, we reached out and a director helped me fix it.

Rachel I worked on the HTML/CSS side of the website. I faced some problems with the HTML code and formatting because I was new to coding but I was able to finish with a team members' help and guidance.

Anchal I worked on the databases with Sriya but I didn’t know how to construct one. We faced many issues trying to debug and edit with Sriya not being able to type but we were able to pull together a final product due to our effective communication and collaboration.

Sriya I was injured but I was the only one who knew how to code a database and I could not type. So, to combat this obstacle we decided that I would tell my fellow teammates how to make them and help them debug the databases. This way I was able to help them complete the project as well as work on the technicality. (I injured my wrists from improper posture while working on the computer.)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of pulling off a working database with the only team member with experience with it unable to type. It was a challenge, but we pulled through with non stop zoom calls.

We are also proud of the dashboard page which has several features that we are excited to integrate.

What we learned

How to communicate solely with voice How to create databases How to create a HTML website Text to Speech API implementation

What's next for Patronus

We would like to partner with nearby community tutors and parents. There is a high demand for a pod software and we believe it would be widely used within the community.

We would like to add more editing access for the parent and create a tutoring dashboard where a tutor can view requests for tutors. We also want to expand upon the online learning features to make it more adaptable for any kind of learning.

Lastly, we want to create it so one user can view and facilitate multiple pods which we didn’t have time to complete.

Thank you and feel free to view our design here! All of our code can be accessed here.

(Note the repl.it does not contain the official database)

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