Skilltracks

Inspiration

As our team was discussing possible ideas for what we could build, we began talking about how each one of us learnt our skills. All three of us had used free online resources like Youtube videos, blog posts and articles to learn, but we all faced a common problem. The ubiquity of learning resources online means there's a ton of information and learners often have to sift through many resources to find the best ones. The noise of the internet also means that there are multiple conflicting voices on what the best way to learn something is. All these factors make many new learners anxious about where to start when learning something new.After conducting a few surveys we found that a very large number of people are overwhelmed when starting to learn something and find it difficult to create a plan on how they can acquire the required sub-skills. Ultimately we wanted to solve this problem because we were scratching our own itch!

What it does

Crowdsourced roadmaps to learning a skill is how we solved this problem. Our platform will allow professionals to curate roadmaps with resources that emulate the path they took to learning a skill. Each roadmap could contain links to courses, YouTube videos ,articles, exercises, blog posts that the creator found useful when gaining mastery in their respective fields. By having experts make detailed roadmaps we eliminate the confusion and directionless approach that plagues online learning. It allows learners to establish a clear north star in their path to learning a skill. Another upside of the platform is that it allows users to display roadmaps they're following along with paths they're creating on their own. This lets them maintain a journey map of what they've done so far and also allows other users on the platform to follow their paths.

How we built it

We did this project in the MERN stack leveraging the awesome packages like react-modal and swipper to help us bring our idea into reality. We chose web because a web app is accessible on most devices and thus opens up the app to more people and giving maximum people the access to knowledge is the spirit of this project. We used postman for the API testing and to make sure that the backend does what was intended.

Challenges we ran into

Planning, designing and building an application in 4 days was definitely a challenge for us first-time hackers but we really enjoyed it. The task prioritizing what should be done and is more important was also new to us. We were successful in making the MVP version backend and frontend but the integration of backend and frontend resulted in a lot of issues and was not completed in the time constraint.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully ideated, planned and designed an application in 4 days which was huge for us. We also implemented the backend REST API and frontend and deployed them on sites like heroku and netlify

What we learned

We learned to plan and design and product in a short time and also learn to prioritize what features are important to implement. We also learnt to work in a team and handle the pressure caused due to time constraints

What's next for Skilltracks

Our team is super excited about the future of this project and here are just two of the two use cases. Academia Professors and students could create and share tracks with their classes Human Resources We also believe Skilltracks has the potential to become a great hiring tool as companies could create tracks based on the skills they would like potential employees to have.

Built With

• express.js
• mern
• mongodb
• node.js
• postman
• react
• react-modal
• swipperjs