Sol - Learning Made Easy @ learnwithsol.com

Create and access short lessons built around almost any YouTube video.

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SITE LIVE AT learnwithsol.com

Inspiration

We wanted to create an online learning platform that's light and not too involved for both the consumer and the creator.

No account system, makes the process even more streamlined (adding auth would've been long too so win-win :DD )

What it does

When loading the website, the user will be presented with a random assortment of small, user-generated quizzes, or lessons, each centred around a single YouTube video (perhaps a lecture or educational video).

The user may search for a lesson on a particular topic and then click it, taking them to the Lesson Viewer page. The video will begin playing from start to finish. However, at relevant timestamps specified by the creator of the lesson, the video will pause, and a question will pop-up, along with 4 possible answers. The question could either be on content just covered by the video, or it could be randomly testing the knowledge of the user from content conveyed earlier in the video, ensuring the user has kept engaged. If the user picks the right answer, they are notified, and the video continues. However, if the user gets the question wrong, a short explanation on what the correct answer is (inputted by the original creator for each question) is shown. Once the user has read this, they can continue watching the video, with more questions popping up for any further timestamps.

Alternatively, a user may create their own lesson out of a YouTube video, perhaps on a topic they've recently learnt about, or a subject they're very familiar with. After providing a title, description and optional details about themselves, they may input a YouTube URL. Confirming this will take the user to the Lesson Builder page, with the video at the top and a button just below. The user can then go through the video, and at any appropriate timestamp, they can press the button. This will save that timestamp, pause the video, and give the user an input field to insert his question, alongside 4 possible answers, indicating which one is correct. Also, an explanation on what the correct answer is and why can be provided by the user. They can then repeat this multiple times throughout the video to continually ensure viewers of this lesson have been engaging and learning the videos content. This eventually builds up a full lesson, consisting of that video and a collection of questions asked at timestamps throughout the video.

How we built it

Frontend was done in Typescript. Backend in Java. We used react-bootstrap because of familiarity and cos its gud. Frontend will be/is hosted on Netlify.

Challenges we ran into

  • Generating unique, shareable URLs for each lesson.
  • Getting created lessons to be stored successfully in our database.
  • Getting the lesson builder to actually work
  • Figuring out how to actually interact with the video player (Cheers you made it slightly less painful)
  • Probably other stuff I've already forgotten

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The lesson builders functional wooooo
  • We should get our MVP done

What's next for Sol - Learning Made Easy @ learnwithsol.com

  • Unfortunately it will likely be retired. Maybe if some sudden success comes from this hackathon, we may reconsider, but for now it will likely become an old, dusty project. Still hella fun tho

Hope we've SOL-d you on our project hahahahahahahaha

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