Tutorbook

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  A typical setup for a peer tutoring supervisor.

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  The "Manual Matching" workspace where peer tutoring supervisors can match students with tutors.

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  Because Tutorbook is a PWA (Progressive Web App), we support almost any operating system!

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  A tutor's profile view.

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  What it looks like to send a lesson request with Tutorbook.

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  App settings.

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  Peer tutoring supervisors approve/reject peer tutor's clock-in and clock-out requests.

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  What the dashboard screen looks like.

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  Lots of destinations within our PWA!

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  Students can filter by subject, availability, grade, gender, rating, etc.

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  All of your upcoming, past (those you've clocked in to and out of), and active (those you've clocked in to) appointments.

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  The search view.

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  What peer tutors see when their clock-in requests are rejected.

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  The search view w/ the filter dialog open on mobile.

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  What peer tutors see when their clock-out requests are rejected.

Inspiration

My school (Gunn High School) used to use paper to manage their peer tutoring program. It was absolutely ridiculous! If you wanted a tutor, you used to have to physically walk across campus to the "Academic Center", fill out a paper application form, and then wait while the peer tutoring coordinator took that form, filed it into a huge binder of similar forms, and flipped through the "Tutor Binder" to find a tutor that fit within your criteria (i.e. a tutor who can tutor the subjects you want when you're available).

What it does

For an even briefer overview of our project, head over to this form. Or, continue reading for a slightly more in-depth description...

Now, Gunn (and all the other schools in PAUSD) use Tutorbook to manage it's peer tutoring program:

• Peer tutors signup, create their profiles, respond to lesson requests, and track their service hours (usually the required-for-graduation service hours) all on Tutorbook.
• Students can then search, message, and book those tutors--from anywhere, at anytime.
• Supervisors (the people who used to flip through those binders) manage profiles, match students with tutors (if needed; most of the matching can be done by the students themselves), send lesson reminders, and approve/reject service hour requests.

Note that each school gets it's own "web app" at a different .tutorbook.app subdomain (much like Slack workspaces) and you're only able to login to that school's web app (to view it's tutors and such) if you have the school's email address (e.g. to get into Gunn's web app you must login with an @pausd.us or @pausd.org email address).

Since COVID-19 closed Gunn, we've expanded the functionality of Tutorbook to enable peer tutors to log service hours from online (via any platform that their students and staff prefer) tutoring appointments:

1. Students log into Tutorbook’s web app like they normally would and clock-in to their peer tutoring sessions. When the clock-in, they’re given a prompt to upload proof of their tutoring session. Such proof could include: a. Screenshots of their chat history on Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, or any other messaging platform. b. Recordings of their online tutoring sessions on Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, Whereby, or any other video conferencing app. c. PDFs of what they worked on (e.g. a math problem set).
2. Or, students can log service hours after the lesson finished (without having to clock-in and clock-out) by uploading proof of their lesson (like above) and specifying how many service hours they're requesting.

How I built it

For very in-depth technical insights as to how Tutorbook works, check our documentation (automatically generated with JSDocs 3) or source available code. Or, continue reading for a brief, high-level overview...

Tutorbook was built using Firebase (for our back-end), HTML, SCSS, and Vanilla JavaScript (no front-end framework to be seen here haha). While I probably should have used Vue or React, I had originally created my own rendering solution and migrating the entire codebase over to a framework was not in the scope of this hackathon.

For this hackathon, I teamed up and worked on polishing out some scalability issues (e.g. automatically creating school subdomains w/ AWS R53, CloudFront, and S3, adding an onboarding flow, etc).

What I learned

I personally learned a lot about AWS (as it relates to wildcard (e.g. *.tutorbook.app) DNS records), scalability issues with Firebase, and how best to triage work with GitHub Issues, Projects, and Milestones.

What's next for Tutorbook

We're going to build a feature that enables schools to create landing pages for their virtual student support services (e.g. a page with a description of the school and a list of their peer tutors). Schools will then be able to send all of their students a link to this page (e.g. gunn.tutorbook.app for Gunn High School's landing page) where they (the students) will be able to see all of their school's virtual support services (e.g. through links on the page description) and peer tutors in a single place.

Built With

• algolia
• css
• es6
• firebase
• html5
• javascript
• material-design-components
• node.js
• sass
• webpack