Shadow

A remote mentor shadowing app built on the internet computer

Comment

Goal

The goal of shadow is increase both the quantity and quality of remote mentors by allowing them to sit in on streaming sessions given by top mentors.

Inspiration

In January of 2015, after some convincing from the folks at Hacker Fund I signed up to join a hackathon for my first time as a mentor. While the event organizers created enough excitement and energy to have an entire bus full of hackers shouting throughout an 8 hour ride in the middle of the night, I couldn't help but feel nervous about trying to help high school students I had never met before attempt projects using technologies that I may or may not know anything about. As a hacker, I was used to seeking guidance from others and understood that a good mentor could speed up a project tremendously, while a poor one could do just the opposite. While I like to think that I had a generally positive impact on the teams that approached me for help, I still embarrassed myself a number of times and there were plenty of mentors who appeared much more comfortable and prepared to handle any issue the hackers might have.

What it does

I've created Shadow to eliminate concerns held by those deciding whether or not to give mentoring a try, while taking advantage of some of the remote learning trends brought about by the ongoing pandemic. Shadow allows mentors share their expertise without any additional work on their part simply by allowing other potential mentor to sit in as an observer on their mentoring sessions. Aspiring mentors can now see what they are getting into before interacting directly with any students. Additionally, observers can select to upvote the most effective mentors, helping to improve their reputation and providing other mentors to identify and learn from the best.

How I built it

I built Shadow as a web application using the Dfininity sdk to deploy the app to canisters for hosting the assets and performing computations. The asset canister contains the UI elements and connects them to app data written in React. The shadow canister includes computations for managing the mentor session room list.

Challenges I ran into

Initially, I ran into challenges when trying to deploy my application using the Dfinity sdk as one of the build processes running on the React code was adding its own asset structure and interfering with the canister structure.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The functionality needed to meet my project goal is complete and ready for use for myself and others. I was able to explore and utilize a new technology that I had no prior experience with.

What I learned

Prior to this hackathon I didn't know much about the internet computer concept, it was interesting to learn how it works and see it in action by building a project. I was also introduced to the Motoko programing language.

What's next for Shadow

More logic and constraints are needed to properly manage the the mentoring session rooms to prevent misuse. Some sort of authentication is also needed to establish ownership of a room.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates