Teachers Lounge

Home page
View all requests made by teachers
View request details as request creator, edit options available
Submit an offer
View offers for material
Custom Appreciation Cards!
Teachers lounge forum to share teaching resources, tips and tricks

💡 Inspiration

Problem statements identified which we hope to address:

Perverse incentive problem of how teachers are rewarded for their work, where Teachers are rewarded for the quality of teaching materials they use, and thus are reluctant to share their materials and experience with other Teachers to gain personal advantage during appraisal. This is detrimental to the students as useful resources may be withheld from them.
Lack of resources for teachers to use as teaching materials. It is not uncommon for teachers to have to spend from their own pockets or to have to collect their own teaching materials at their own expense. This is sometimes an issue of poor funding or poor management by their school board.
Declining mental health of teachers due to excessive work hours and draining work. Teachers are expected to work long hours outside of classroom time to grade assignments and develop lesson plans. Interacting with students for long hours can also be exhausting, which is detrimental to the mental health of Teachers. In our country, recent government attempts to alleviate this problem with AI have failed with the chatbot giving bogus mental health advice to Teachers.

We hoped to develop a platform to help mitigate some of these issues.

🔍 What it does

Our website consists of three main components to address the problems we have identified above. They are as follows:

A market style section for Teachers to request materials so that they need not pull from their own wallets to supplement their teaching.
A forum section for Teachers to share resources with one another
A custom card design section for students to create customised appreciation cards with cool template designs for their Teachers.

1) Teaching Materials Request

We make use of Wix’s marketplace-like structure to develop a platform for Teachers to request for teaching materials that they need. This component aims to address the issue of Teachers not having access to the materials they need for teaching and needing to contribute their personal funds for their teaching.

While we have found that there are some platforms allowing cash donations, there is no solution for people to directly donate materials that they have to the Teachers. By donating materials we can reduce waste by preventing existing resources from being discarded whilst also providing these resources to those who need it.

To summarise this component, we enable Teachers to post their requests for materials and the general public to view. The public can then create offers to contribute materials that they have to these teachers, and include a contact email or drop off point to pass the materials that only the teacher who created the post can see.

2) Teachers forum

We have divided the forum into 3 sub sections using Wix forum categories for Teachers to classify the type of resource they are sharing.

The first category is the "Existing Digital Resources". From our research we have found that there is actually an abundance of eduTech teaching tools for teachers to use. For instance, at the kindergarten level, there are lots of free applications on the web and apple store teachers can download and use to aid in teaching concepts like basic maths and vocabulary. However, not all Teachers are aware of the resources available, nor do they have the time to search through these resources and evaluate them themselves. Having this sub category allows teachers to suggest the best of the many resources to each other, and make better use of tech available.

The second category of resources is "Teaching Techniques". This category allows Teachers to share the tips and tricks they use to keep their students engaged in lessons, or how to manage rowdy students. For instance, teachers of students with special needs require special knowledge on how to handle issues like meltdowns, specific learning difficulties and so on. Having a forum for Teachers to openly share their tips and tricks is mutually beneficial to the Teachers, and is especially helpful for those who have less extensive training for such situations. We hope that such a discussion space can help mitigate some of the perverse incentive problem

The third category is Teacher Support. This sub forum category hopes to serve as a space for teachers to share their struggles and support one another in their teaching journey. It is also intended for moderators to share about mental health services and functional technology (as opposed to the untested AI previously mentioned). Eventually, we hope to better understand the issues Teachers face, and in the future develop more specific solutions than just throwing available resources at Teachers haphazardly.

3) Custom Card Creation

In the “Custom Cards” page, users can easily create custom appreciation cards. Finding or making a good design can be tedious. With this function, we simplify the process so users can focus on writing messages to appreciate their Teachers. Our customizable card maker allows a user to write messages, choose font colours and bold text. It also supports sending of the generated card to the recipients.

🔧 How we built it

The main bulk of the website was built with Wix Velo. For the static descriptive sections, we used some of the default components to quickly scaffold the design. Some such sections are the Homepage, the FAQ, the About page. Components such as sections, galleries were used as a base then we customised the designs and animations in the editor.

For the more complex interactive sections, we first watched some video tutorials on Udemy to understand how to set up the website for an e-commerce website, then adapted what we learned from there. From there we learned how to properly create databases, connect data to displays such as repeater and item pages, and how to use code to modify the data displayed on each of the items. For example, information such as the number of days since a post is calculated and updated using code.

We have two main databases. The first one to store the table of Requests posts. It is populated by the Request form, which can only be filled by logged in members. These requests that have not yet been fulfilled are displayed in the Requests View page. The public may view these requests and click to see request details. The creator of the request may also update the request in the Update request page.

The second database is to store the table of offers. Public members may create an offer after viewing the Request details page. The offers for a specific request may be viewed by the Teacher who created the request if they are logged in. The teacher may then select which offer they would like to review. Once an offer is selected, it is listed in the Request database, and the request is marked as “isFulfilled”. We have also included a map component to mark out the potential meeting point visually.

We then populated our database with a series of dummy data to demonstrate the functionality of our website. Which can be seen in our demo video. To improve the user experience, we tried to use new components such as the light boxes in the user flow.

For the forum component, we installed the Wix Forum app from Wix App Market. We then edited the settings of the website to create the categories to separate the different forum posts.

Appreciation card maker was built with Flask. We used the pillow library to allow us to customise the text onto the card. The Flask app was hosted on pythonanywhere and embedded onto Wix using their iframe component.

For the send email component, we made use of Twilio Sendgrid API. We authenticated our email on Sendgrid, allowing us to send custom emails to the recipients. The sent email contains the sender’s name and the generated card image is sent as an email attachment.

🏃‍♂️ Challenges we ran into

It was very hard to get started with some of the more complicated features of Wix at first, but after we found the Udemy course, we were able to get a better understanding of Wix’s functionality and services for E-commerce, and were able to adapt it accordingly.
We were unsure how to collaborate when working on Wix. We had to take turns to update the components as required.
It took some time to figure out how to create the editor for the custom card design and we stayed up late at night to get it done.
It took some time to populate the database with dummy data
As we created a number of custom pages and dataflows, we had to look up a lot of things things, and had issues such as how to pass data between pages, how to refresh the page, how to add filters on the datasets programmatically, how to programmatically change text displayed and more. Thankfully we were able to resolve these and some of the other bugs we encountered in time.

🏅 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating an app to make custom appreciation cards.
Adding an email function for users to easily send the generated appreciation cards to their Teachers.
Hosting the Flask app on pythonanywhere.
Creating a comprehensive wix application to address the problems identified despite our limited prior experience with Wix.

🧠 What we learned

Some of the technical things we learned include:

Learned what is a wsgi file and how to host Flask app on pythonanywhere
Understood more on HTML and CSS. Velo by Wix allowed us to learn more about designing and to create better websites.
Understood the use of dotenv to access secrets and environment variables.
Learned to use Sendgrid API to send an email automatically.
We learned how to create all the components and functionality with Wix as listed above.

We also learned about the struggles that Teachers faced, and learned to better appreciate the efforts that our Teachers have put in to help us academically through the years.

⏭️ What's next for Teachers Lounge

We want to add an input function for teachers to list their school location to help set a dropoff point
Verification that the people posting requests are teachers, to ensure there are no fraudulent requests
Members of the public posting offers of materials that they do have, for instance with many schools upgrading their technology, they may be interested in publically donated smart screens and smart devices to equip the teachers and students. The public may offer such devices second hand.
Better categorization of items to donate, to better facilitate search. Additional filters and sorting would also be useful.