Inspiration
For iStudySmart, we were inspired by our own personal lives. After having our first year of high school online, the transition to in-person school wasn’t easy, and we felt like we didn’t get the full preparation for high school like we normally would’ve with freshman year. This year, studying has felt like a stressful and daunting task, and we wanted to make a project that would help it seem more approachable. One system we were also inspired by was the Khan Academy PSAT plan. It provides a calendar to pace yourself until the day of the test.
What it does
Our project aims to break the stereotype that studying is stressful and difficult. To solve this, we created a website that guides students through two study methods in a more engaging way. That’s why we tried to make our site visually appealing- to make the learning experience more fun! We provided a checklist of all the steps to go through during your study session to make the process more organized.
How we built it
We used the beginner-friendly platform, replit, to code with HTML and CSS! We styled links that connected the user through different web pages, featuring the study methods.
Challenges we ran into
While creating iStudySmart, we ran into some obstacles, but quickly overcame them as a team. One problem we had was having a lot of ideas but not enough time to execute them all. Another problem we ran into was coming up with animations for the website. Sometimes we would code an animation that would mess with the format of other text in place, or just did not work properly. We also did not have much experience with the z-index property in css, but in the end, we figured out to adjust this value to make the animation appear as a background. However, we are incredibly happy with how our hack turned out especially under the time limit.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of all the cool animations we featured on the home page, the animations on the titles of the study method pages, the flow chart on the SQ3R page, and building the navbar! Also, we are proud of building the checklist function since that helps students, like us, keep focus in our study session. Building the flowchart from scratch on the SQ3R page was also another accomplishment! As beginner coders, we are so happy we formed our ideas into a tangible website.
What we learned
We learned that we work better together, so we made an effort to communicate clearly and whenever we approached a problem, we made sure to get each other’s opinions, so we could tackle it together. Also, we learned the importance of testing. To test different aspects of the website, we “forked” the original replit and made changes on the copy. That way we didn’t break anything on the original website.
What's next for iStudySmart
In the future, we hope to add a quiz feature, where anyone can create their own questions to test what they learned in the study session as well as building a built-in timer where we code in Javascript ourselves! We also would love to feature more study methods to suit the needs of different students and make our website more accessible like adding voice narrations, having a study music playlist, etc
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