Inspiration
We were inspired by the fact that this pandemic has limited the potential of young students. To remedy this, we decided to build ToastLearn, a collaborative learning platform.
What it does
ToastLearn, designed with a smooth and ergonomic UI and with the express purpose of enhancing learning and providing a good UX, provides eager learners with many learning resources, sorted by discipline and also subject. Learners can use the search bar to search for topics relevant to them. If the topic the learner is looking for cannot be found, they can add a toast, after which our specially designed web crawlers look for relevant videos on YouTube and articles on Wikipedia. After the crawlers finish crawling the web, the toast will be ready for use.
How we built it
We built ToastLearn with the use of Google Cloud, Domain.com, Firebase, Node.js, HTML5, and Python. These tools allowed us to deploy and program our website and APIs easily and efficiently. With Google Cloud and Firebase, we were able to deploy our website to the web for free and quickly. With Domain.com, we acquired our domain. With Node.js and HTML5, we built our frontend. With Python, we built our backend which allowed us to fully flesh out the features that we envisioned being in ToastLearn.
Challenges we ran into
Building ToastLearn was not easy. Throughout the process, we experienced challenges which we learned and improved from. For example, we were stuck with getting a Firebase Function to work. However, after a bit of debugging and rewriting code, we got it to work and learned more about Firebase and Google Cloud. We also had some problems getting our DNS to properly propagate, but in the end, it worked, and we got our domain from Domain.com up and running without problems. Over the course of this hackathon, our project was tirelessly worked and reworked until we were satisfied with it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of being able to help and inspire learners all over the world with Toastlearn. We believe that with ToastLearn, we have discovered new ways of implementing libraries as well as working efficiently with our teammates. Working with teammates can be hard, with different time zones, but thankfully, we worked well together and learned to collaborate better.
What we learned
We learned that learning doesn't have to be a challenge for us and users of ToastLearn as well. We believe that with ToastLearn, we have made learning so much easier for everybody.
What's next for ToastLearn
For ToastLearn, we will be implementing more features such as login, live chat with other learners to get help, and also better scraping algorithms so that we can better help our learners. In addition, we will be adding a report button so that our community can be kept safe from griefers and trolls.
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