Questify

Inspiration

Have you ever wanted to ask a question during a lecture but felt afraid to ask in front of your peers? Turns out you're not alone, a study conducted in 2016 found that “19%-33% of undergraduates who have experienced high levels of social anxiety that have reported symptoms (Campbell et al., 2016)”, and in another study “91% of a sample with social phobia reported interference with their academic performance” (Strahan, 2003). Furthermore, the effects of social anxiety on academic performance are more significant on minority students. In STEM classes, “female undergraduates [who are usually underrepresented] report significantly higher levels of student anxiety than their male peers, and that trend holds regardless of grade point average (GPA) or preparedness” (Pelch, 2018). This increases the disparity in learning for STEM related fields, and Questify aims to facilitate a more inclusive environment for learning and opens the floor for discussion among students.

What it does

Questify is an app that allows students to connect with their professors while lectures are being taught, live. When a student signs up for the app, their username is set to their student number. However, their username is only visible to the professor, and not to other students. This ensures the student’s privacy, but also enables the professor to handle students who may post irrelevant or inappropriate content in the app. Students can send in questions as lecture progress and content is being taught and have their questions pop up on the professor’s screen. Students can upvote questions they feel they may have in common or would like more clarity on. Accordingly, based on upvotes on questions, professors can prioritize class time towards answering questions with the most amount of upvotes submitted by their students. As questions are answered, the professor can check off questions they have answered and the students can rate the answer of the professor with a thumbs up or thumbs down, which would either deem satisfactory or demand further clarification respectively. At the end of class, if the professor is not able to get to certain questions, they can download them as a .txt file and post their explanations to their students.

How we built it

We built a version of the app on Python that runs locally. Due to the time constraint of this hackathon and some unforeseen problems with group members, we are planning on implementing this into Django at a later date. However, we have attached some sketches of how we expect the user interface to look like.

Challenges we ran into

One issue we ran into was miscommunication amongst other team members. Initially, we had a team of 4, and two of the members were more experienced in web development. However, closer to the due date of the project, two members stopped communicating with us. Since the two remaining members were not experienced with web development, we were able to come up with a locally run version of our app, and hopefully we will be able to convert it into an app after learning Django’s implementation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Previously, we have worked on data science and research projects related to computer science, but haven’t made computer server/client computer/mobile applications from scratch using our computer science experience. We are proud to have learned a bit of Django and React along our process, and to have successfully fleshed out our idea by the end of the hackathon.

What we learned

This is one of our first hackathons, and we gained a lot of experience in choosing what front end/back end technology to use. We also gained experience in pitching our idea in a concise way and gained teamwork skills with people from different backgrounds. While researching the scope of the problem we were trying to solve, we realized that the problem of social anxiety affects a lot more people than we expected, and were surprised that there was a strong gendered difference in the way it affects academic performance.

What's next for Questify

Our next steps of improvement would be to make our application more accessible for universities and institutions to directly implement Questify into their existing e-learning platforms (i.e Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, etc.). For example, we aim to make Questify a plug-in application to be used as an inclusive way to measure class participation for students with mental health disabilities and directly implement the results from each class session into grades. Moreover, for future iterations of the app we hope to implement location-based sessions to ensure students maintain the integrity of Questify sessions during lecture to avoid irrelevant participation from students not enrolled in the class or distracting participation.