Inspiration
Class can be tedious at times. Other times, it can be extremely difficult. Has it ever occurred to you that there is a better way? After decades, the education system is still broken. One noticeable problem is the lack of communication between the students and the teacher. I'm not pointing any fingers. Both teachers and students try their best to fulfill their role, but people are complicated!
What it does
Thus, we introduce PresFeed, an easy to use platform that allows an audience of students provide feedback in a very reactive and quick way! Teachers can easily access a custom session and set alerts to get feedback from all of the students. Students only need to pull out their phones, and install an app (or use a browser).
- Students can anonymously provide their own opinions without the fear of embarrassment or standing out.
- Teachers will receive alerts when a majority of the students are having trouble understanding the material in the most recent slide.
- No effort required! - Teachers can start a session with ease, and students can use any device they like!
How we built it
Lot's of hard work, planning and smooth execution. Using Rails and Postgresql as the backend, the API documentation and functionality was carefully planned and completed first. This allowed us to decouple the clients, so that we can provide usability on both mobile and web devices. We chose Angular.js, because of the convenient data binding and popularity!
Challenges we ran into
CORS issues were a pain to get right with Rails. Requests didn't play nicely between the client and server. Nginx wasn't working as we would have liked since we were using various different ports to host different ares of our app.
What's next for PresFeed
So, why are we called PresFeed? - Because this is NOT limited to just education! PresFeed provides easy access to give feedback with a single press. Imagine the possibilities! This type of service can be used for presentations, speeches and storytelling. Heck, you can even use this for movies, or dramatic plays!
And we are keeping the api open for others, too: http://docs.pushfeed.apiary.io/#
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