StudyOur

Inspiration

We were inspired by Jeba's father - a life long educator who complains about the distractions of cell phones in the classroom. A phenomenon that has only appeared not too long ago. In fact attention spans have decreased from 12 to 8 seconds in just 15 years. It doesn't help that our online experiences are aggressively dominated by advertisements and 6 second videos. A typical American checks their phone 80 times a day! So how do we reconcile the raging Internet with the focus required in classroom?

What it does

StudyOurs is a a community enforced tool to incentivize students to pull away from digital distractions. We help teachers increase classroom productivity and student attention span by connecting all cell phones. It's simple: the longer students stay away from checking their phone, the more a visualization grows. If someone picks up their phone, the visualization dies and will have to start from scratch. Teachers can then set up incentives within their classroom.

How we built it

The front end is powered by React which allows students and teachers to dynamically log in to a classroom session. Our back End is hosted on Azure and uses express.js and web sockets to communicate interactions in real time. The visualizations are developed by very robust, fun and friendly tools called materialUI and is connected to the backEnd to accurately represent the status of the classrooms cell phones.

Challenges we ran into

Updating the accounts of multiple clients to the web sockets proved to be troublesome. A lack of web sockets further frustrated us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a fully functioning web app created in less than 24 hours! A simple app that has already received the approval of multiple teachers we conducted market research with.

What we learned

We learned how to isolate real needs and implement effective solutions.

What's next for StudyOur

We hope that our next version will incorporate weekly progress bars and dashboards to further help teachers incentivize their students to pay attention and stay away from their phones.