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Login Page
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Speech to Text Option on Student View
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Text Option on Student View
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Teacher View
Inspiration
Looking around our team, we see a common trait that hinders us in the classroom: Shyness. It's hard to ask questions during class, especially in front of large audiences. We want to combat this issue by giving the large population of students like us an opportunity to engage actively in classroom participation with confidence.
Additionally, we tackled another problem. When questions are asked during class, many students have difficulty hearing what was asked as well as reviewing that material, as it may not always be in the lecture material. With our product, important questions along with the teacher's answers will be recorded and sent out via email post-lesson. This way, key supplemental information will be provided to students to further enhance their learning experience.
What it does
To address this lack of confidence during class, we provide an anonymous question portal that allows any student to ask a question through voice or text. This is disguised as a word processor, further allowing anonymity for students who feel too shy to ask questions. These questions will be sent to the teacher portal in real-time, where the teacher can select questions to answer. Once the class has concluded, Q/A pairs will be sent out to the class through email.
How we built it
We implemented our idea with a variety of frameworks. Using MongoDB, we first started the development of the database to store the questions being asked. This database served as our main backend tool to store and send the data collected from student and teacher responses. We utilized Twilio's SendGrid to email the data. Our front-end application displayed this information using React JS. To control our microphone, we used an interface between javascript and the Google Cloud API for converting speech to text.
Challenges we ran into
One of our main challenges was formulating the idea. Because we wanted to create a product that was meaningful to both us and our peers, we spent many nights brainstorming a project that resonated with us. Thus, Qloak was born. During Qloak's development, we also ran into many technical problems, such as making sure button clicks were working properly with incoming data, correctly timing that data, and sharing it between users. We worked together by breaking up and assigning tasks that would capitalize on each of our individual strengths. As a team, we were able to successfully coordinate with each other and ultimately integrate our code together.
Accomplishments that we are proud of
Our team is proud that we brought to life an idea that will meaningfully impact and help our fellow peers. Additionally, during this process, each of us had to tackle programs and concepts that we had never worked with before.
What we learned
We learned the importance of teamwork. At the end of our hack, we reflected on our accomplishments and realized how we were able to combine our talents together and efficiently finish our task. Working together allowed us to bounce ideas off each other to polish and strengthen. Also, we became stronger developers after this project, as the product required a wide variety of parts and provided us with full exposure to software such as React, mongoDB, and Twilio.
What's next for Qloak
Our next step is to deploy our product to a larger scale so that we can increase visibility to a wider userbase. We would also like to work on a more intuitive user interface with additional functionalities to allow for smoother flows and interactions.
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