Student Stride

"Your Path, OUR Community"

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Inspiration

Most students, especially from low-income settings, are always in a dilemma on how to plan for college education, some of which include playing a game or managing their time in class. They only realize when exactly exigencies are necessary, and often by then it is already too late. This issue is then aggravated by the costly price of professional college admission programs. Student Stride was created based on the realization of the existence of this gap. Our platform allows young high school students to get in contact with older students who would be willing to share their experience and knowledge. This mentorship ensures that the young students are informed early enough of the opportunities as well as the strategies to enable them to sail through the academic year.

What It Does

Student Stride is used as a link to enable students in higher classes to offer their knowledge to lower class students or even be of help to them. It is similar to Schoolhouse, but personal guidance and tricks at school/college will be covered. Also, there is a discussion board on the platform for low-income students in which they can seek help from other students who faced the same barriers.

How We Built It

We constructed the app through creating the website element and the functionality at the same time and then combining both chunks of code at last. This platform was built using React for enhanced dynamic and responsiveness of the platform.

Challenges for Functionality

  • Secure authentication with Firebase.
  • Extending the functionality with the help of ChatEngine for creating chat.

Challenges for Interface

  • Scaling of the website led to other problems in which some of the elements did not respond well.
  • To solve the issue we included media queries and resulted in a site which was friendly to many screens.

Accomplishments That We’re Proud Of

We are glad to have incorporated the use of the chatbot feature, and also happy to have been able to create this platform where low-income students can seek help on college admission and education without having to pay for costly programs from renowned companies.

What We Learned

While creating Student Stride, we learned the importance of peer support or mentorship. What we later found out was that information sharing can greatly influence the academic life of a particular student. We also learned of the difficulties that first-generation and low-income students have which enabled us to extend our platform and address their needs more adequately.

What’s Next

We plan on making acquaintances with schools and high school counselors to ensure that our website is among the sources of counseling students; hence, students are provided with a free and user-friendly website containing valuable information from former and current students. We also wish to contact students from standard universities like the Ivy Leagues, MIT, Stanford, and other such universities to help other students to get admission into such institutions through our website. In the future, it would be ideal to work with companies such as Kollegio and Next Admit to improve and widen the services offered.

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