The Write Place

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Inspiration

As students ourselves, we write hundreds of essays over our high school careers, for English class, research internships and projects, or (the dreaded) college applications. In the writing process, it’s often beneficial to have a few pairs of eyes look over our work to check for grammar, content, and logical errors. However, it can be difficult to find individuals who we know to look over essays for us. For many, it would be more convenient to simply submit an essay and have a grader matched with the writer.

Our inspiration for this project is our own struggle as students—this problem is significant to our team because we’ve all been in the same shoes—we have multiple essays to write but sometimes we wish we had someone to look over them and give feedback. Someone who has been in the same class, been through the same process, and has learned of the minor tips and tricks that can entirely change the impact of the essay, while providing us with valuable advice to implement in our future work. As high school students, we are also always looking for volunteer opportunities ourselves, and ways in which we can help others with our own knowledge and gained experience. This reward-based app would provide students like ourselves with an opportunity to gain service hours and help others within our school community and beyond, while also creating a platform that would allow us to connect with experienced students and get our own work reviewed.

What it does

Our app provides an intermediary platform through which writers can submit their works, graders can be anonymously assigned to essays, and users can advance their writing skills. Our app works as follows: a student submits their work into the system by submitting a Google Doc or external link Then, that essay is sent to a students within the community who have themselves for the certain subject/activity (for example, an AP US History essay will only be recommended to students who have a tag showing that they have taken the class already), who will then give feedback to the writer. The aspect that sets our app apart from other grading platforms is the rewards system. Often, most essay editing and peer-based review platforms out there cost money, but most high school and college students cannot afford such services. Our app provides an incentive to help others while also helping ourselves, with no money involved—almost like going back to the old bartering days. New users will be encouraged to grade others’ essays, as doing so will earn those users points, which will then allow them to have their own work graded. We hope this system will encourage students to collaborate with and support their communities, while also removing any financial or technical barriers. Another feature of our app is the concept of communities/workspaces. As we know with apps like Slack and Discord, we are often a part of multiple communities as academic students. For example, a user could join the Early College at Guilford Community, as well as the Robotics Club and Summer Research Lab communities. This serves to departmentalize the reviewing process while also broadening the access of an individual user. All in all, this rewards and ranks system will create a community in which users can all help one another and get value out of doing service as a result.

**Process"" Login

Sign in/register Select a workspace
“Search” for a workspace
Click a workspace List of possible essays to review
You can see who submitted the essay, how many points they have, profile picture, the title of essay
Click an essay to start reviewing
Listed in order of most to least recent (however, there is no “search” feature) Reviewing an essay
Scroll through essay
Swipe comments box up and down to show more of the essay vs. more of your comments
Submitting an essay returns you to the list of possible essays to review Uploading an essay
Submit a Google Docs link
Select “primary” tag (e.g. eng, hist)
Select “secondary” tag (e.g. ap lang) - Note that the secondary tags change in response to the primary tag selected (only works for eng and hist currently) List of your essays that have been reviewed
You can see who reviewed the essay, how many points they have, profile picture, the title of your essay
Click an essay to view feedback
Listed in order of most to least recent (however, there is no “search” feature) Looking at feedback on your essay
Scroll through essay
Swipe comments box up and down to show more of essay/comments
Exiting an essay prompts you to rate the feedback you received

How we built it

We built our app using Java and XML within Android Studio. We also used GitHub in order to individually submit our work as repositories and allow every team member to have access to the updated code to work off of.

Challenges we ran into

One of our most challenging moments was of course figuring out how to use Android Studio and its associated libraries and tools in order to create what we wanted. All of us had a fair background in programming, but it was the first time any of us had created a project using Android Studio, which required an in-depth understanding of Java, XML, how to integrate them, and how to navigate through the IDE platform itself. There were so many features at the start that it was quite overwhelming. Oftentimes, there were tiny errors or flaws that were difficult to figure out, and led to quite a bit of mental taxation. However, we didn’t give up. Despite having no mentor or guide to help us, we worked with and grew upon one another to teach ourselves through hours of YouTube videos, online tutorials, and StackOverflow posts—we are surely proud of what we have ended up with, because the process provided us with an experience in app development that will be beneficial in the future.

Another challenging moment was getting started with an idea. In our 5-month timeline over which we developed our app, much time was allotted to brainstorming. With every new project, the hardest part in our experience was getting an idea rolling—after that stage, it’s simply carrying out a plan. We spent a while generating ideas for our app by identifying problems we, as students, could relate to and that did not already exist in the ever-growing industry of educational apps, and once we had identified an issue, we spent days planning out and refining a solution that optimized the user experience and was tailored to the needs of students like ourselves.

Also, one of our initial ideas was to use the Google Docs API in order to integrate the shared doc into our platform. However, we realized that we did not have such access or ability to perform this integration through Android Studio, so we instead figured out how to fetch the information from a Google doc or other website through standard Java libraries like Java URL and Base64.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have been able to create demo users, as that means that we would easily be able to accommodate real-time users when associated with a database to work with. We were also happy to be able to figure our how to properly fetch and format the contents of a Google Doc submission, as well as to add the transitions between app pages that enhances the look and feel of our app.

What we learned

All of us learned a lot more about how to integrate XML—a scripting language we had not used much prior to this project—with Java, as well as how to navigate through the Android Studio IDE and use some of the hundreds of features that it provides us with. We also better learned how to work with GitHub throughout the app development process, which would surely be helpful for larger team projects in college or even our careers. We are grateful to Ready, Set, App! for providing us with a platform through which we were able to showcase our programming skills and interests, and for allowing us to become better developers and grow a stronger team-bond with one another.

What's next for The Write Place

Next, we would like to figure out how to add features such as inline commenting within the reviewing side of the app, as well as even annotating tools, both of which would be very useful for the reviewer to properly communicate what they are trying to tell their student. We would also like to hopefully test out our app with a real community like our school with an actual database associated with our program.