Inspiration
Before we started the hackathon officially, we were talking about our PSJ Praxis Projects and their relevance in today's society. A common theme between most of our praxis projects were inequalities and gaps in education, and how it just felt like people weren't getting equal opportunities to quality education despite that being a supposed inherent human right today. So, when we started our hackathon, it was an easy choice to do access to education, and in this case STEM Education specifically. Along with that, pre-existing websites, like Duolingo and Prodigy gave us a reference point on where and how to start. Picking and choosing elements from these pre-existing resources gave us things that we wanted to incorporate and things we definitely didn't want to include, allowing us to have a rough draft of how our website was going to look and operate.
What it does
Stem-X is a free, gamified website designed to bridge the gap for K-12 students in STEM Education. Through a dataset of interactive questions, students and learners are able to gather and brew potions as they learn, turning their often mechanical academic practice into something more exciting and something they can look forward to. By blending these elements together, STEM-X makes STEM Education accessible, motivating and fun for everyone.
How we built it
We built it using resources that we had learned previously, like JavaScript from AP Computer Science Principles, and HTML and CSS from middle school and personal projects outside of a typical academic setting. Along with that, we utilized free and open assets on itch.io to cut down on time, UI design and aesthetic aspects. We also learned how to make pixel art, and even though none of us are particularly good at it, it was still fun to learn and definitely something to explore more in the future.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest challenges we ran into was timing. Unfortunately, with such different schedules, getting four people together to finish a project was a struggle. We often had to compromise and just meet with two members of the group instead and then catch the other members up when we saw them next, and thankfully, that did end up working out, and we finished our project. Moreover, there was no publicly available database that we could use for K-12 STEM Education that wasn't behind a paywall or hidden deep within the Google archives. It was unfortunate, but it also gave us the opportunity to be more acquainted with the material that we were using our product to teach and educate K-12 students on. Along with that, it had also been quite a while since any of us had last used CSS or HTML for that matter, so we watched a lot of YouTube videos, had multiple tabs open to w3school's website for both languages, and needed to debug a LOT. We would often meet up and go line by line, on the verge of a crash out, to figure out what the issue was. It was often something simple, like incorrect brackets or a missing semicolon, but other times, it was a much bigger issue, like code for our page 2 conflicting and completely breaking our code for page 3, which we had to rewrite multiple times (as shown by our 200+ commits on the GitHub Repository). Despite these challenges, we were able to work through them and get our project up and running!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Like stated before, we're proud of finishing our project! As a group of entirely juniors, with so much on our plates, ranging from SATs to APs, it was definitely possible that we wouldn't finish. However, we persevered through and were able to get it done and up for public viewing! Additionally, we're proud of the fact that our code works. As stated before, the last time any of us had used HTML or CSS was probably freshman year or even middle school for that matter, so the fact that we were able to use JavaScript, HTML and CSS together AND make it work was a feat in itself for us.
What we learned
We've learned so much throughout this project, but we've also learned how much we don't know about the world and how it operates behind the scenes. For example, we've learned about the STEM Education gap, but we've also learned that math was the sector that had the BIGGEST gap between an expected range, and the actual range, and unfortunately, there seems to be so many reasons and none at all the same time for this issue. It's disheartening to learn about things like this, but it also helped us open our eyes, and really lock in what we wanted to focus on with STEM-X. Along with that, we've learned so much about coding, and it's rekindled a lot of our passions for coding that seem to have dwindled with the sudden rise in AI and the exponential decline in careers and jobs in the computer science industry. Lastly, we've also learned the importance of communicating with our team, since, as stated before, time and meeting up was a big issue for us. Despite this, we learned how to stay in touch and keep each other updated on what was discussed in the meetings and what needs to be done by a certain deadline. It allowed us to work more efficiently, despite the time constraints.
What's next for Stem-X
If we had more time, we would definitely add a bigger database. We only have 35 questions in our data bank right now, and we would definitely like to add at least a 1000. We were talking about this, and one of our group members mentioned adding a 100+ questions for each grade level and each facet of STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) with toggles so that people could control what they wanted to learn. Furthermore, we would definitely add to the gamified aspect of our website, because we understand that it can get boring because of how repetitive it is. We would absolutely add a more engaging storyline that encourages further and deeper learning, hopefully with better UI and a more stable platform to host our website on. We would love to expand more on this project, given the opportunity and time.
Additional Notes
Please do not use Safari to open the website; it seems like it doesn't work very well on Safari. However, most other web browsers should be good to use. Thank you and enjoy our project!
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