Inspiration
With the recent immense move to e-learning worldwide due to the ongoing pandemic, we've decided on creating a networked whiteboard in which teachers would be able to host their own whiteboard, invite students, and write on a whiteboard for students to follow along.
We thought this method would be a lot more optimal than just sharing a screen, and thus have started building a networked HTML5 canvas whiteboard.
How I built it
It's a basic networked HTML5 canvas with options to change stroke size and colors. We made use of socket.io to broadcast any writing made on the whiteboard across to all users connected. Also made use of react for some basic front end work, and express for the web server.
Challenges I ran into
We're both 2nd year students who are a bit less experienced to web and more on the system level programming side. So this is definitely a new experience, and the fact that we've been able to learn new technologies has been an enriching experience. We're currently working on incorporating a rooms system into our application, which we're having a bit of trouble finding where to start.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Learned a ton of new web technologies, and how to incorporate some optimization. Learnt a bit of basic react, which has definitely been helpful with the front end. Also took up socket.io, receiving, and broadcasting events from user to user. It was just an overall great learning experience, and the skills we took up will definitely be used in the future.
What's next for Shareclass
Hoping to implement a full working room system before the Hackathon submission deadline. For the future, I'll definitely work on this as a side project and add more features such as a little sidebar chat with perhaps some voice chat features. The ability for an admin of the room to control who can write or who can't write on the whiteboard, etc.
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