Inspiration
As passionate students, we live, breathe, (and suffer) the world of learning, and we've come to love and hate the discussion board known as Piazza. Driven by our beliefs that the learning experience can always improve, we wanted to build a solution based upon our own struggles with the platform. The idea is specifically for students who think Piazza can get too tedious to scroll through, or for those who start their assignment late and need a quick summary of all the discussion posts.
What it does
The Piazzeria is a program that parses all the Piazza posts within a course, and outputs a summary of the most important questions and answers. It is essentially a filter function that Piazza is missing, in other forum-type websites you are able to sort by the most popular posts or comments to view the most relevant information, but for some reason Piazza is missing this feature.
How we built it
We made this project by coding a website in React, Javascript, HTML and CSS. Images were created with Pixlr. We use a piazza API (i.e., https://github.com/hfaran/piazza-api) to get the following information: {folder, title, question, student answer, instructor answer, link to question} from posts, and then connect it to the frontend using Flask.
Challenges we ran into
We actually had to adjust our idea halfway through because of our overreliance on ChatGPT/Cohere. Initially we wanted to have Cohere generate an FAQ based on all the discussion posts, but there was a fundamental problem of trying to classify and aggregate unique pairs of questions and answers, without just remaking Piazza.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The dedication and creativity of our team have been inspiring. We identified a real-world problem and conceptualized a solution that has the potential to make a meaningful impact on our educational experience. Our collaborative efforts led to the development of a prototype that showcases the innovative thinking and technical skills of our team members. We successfully overcame various challenges and roadblocks, demonstrating our resilience and problem-solving abilities.
What we learned
The most important lesson we learned was that innovation is a continuous journey. It's about embracing failures and setbacks as opportunities to learn and grow. The iterative nature of the hackathon process has taught us that failure isn't the end; it's a stepping stone to success. If you are not failing, you're not learning.
What's next for piazzeria
We had a lot of fun with our idea, but in the end we wanted to highlight an important feature of forums that Piazza is missing. Our end goal is to make our solution a part of the official Piazza platform, so we'll make iterative improvements and eventually engage with Piazza's development team to show them what they're missing out on.
Much like a pizza's worth is determined by its toppings, Piazza's worth is as only as good as its features.
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