Tutors @ Rice

Start page
Student see those who can help in a given subject
FB Integration for tutor login
Tutor submit availability for a given subject

Inspiration

Imagine you're a Rice student up past midnight working on a problem set and you need a quick question. You scan your facebook messaging app, and you have friends who have taken the class or could possibly help you, but you don't want to inefficiently send out a bulk amount of messages, hoping to get someone who will reply quickly. We were motivated by the idea that Rice should have a quick and easy way for people to indicate casual online "office hours" in a particular subject, so if person X indicates they are available to tutor via FB message from 10 PM - 2 AM on a certain day, person Y can immediately know to message person X and not stress over finding someone to help.

What it does

The design is simple. From the start page, users can either select to be a "tutor" or a "student." If you choose to be a tutor, the app logs the user in via FB and asks what classes you're available to help, where you can indicate your availability to tutor for a certain day. Also, the tutor can remove any availability they've indicated in the past. On the student side, the student chooses a class they need help in and a list of tutors who can help them and what times they can help are listed.

How we built it

We used two MySQL tables to store all the information, PHP for server-side scripting, Javascript, the FB Javascript SDK to handle logins, and HTML/CSS.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled to make it both user-friendly and simple, but we're proud of what we ended up doing. One challenge I didn't anticipate was that I made the design in a "flow" of different page elements appearing on a single page, so it would be easy to go from Page3 -> Page 4 but not from Page4 -> Page2.