Vibe Check

Inspiration

It is widely known that class participation in lectures is too rare and both students and lecturers would benefit from instant feedback from the class. However many students, especially from marginalised groups, find it difficult to participate in lectures due to imposter syndrome, shyness, and fear of judgement from their peers. Therefore we set out to develop an application allowing instant, live, anonymous feedback from a class during a lecture, while gathering data for lecturers to review after. We were inspired by live-streaming platforms like Twitch and Instagram Live, which show reactions and emoticons from the audience during a video stream!

What it does

We brought our idea into the real world by creating a web app which allows members of the audience to connect through a QR code and react to content shown on the presenter's screen, in REALTIME! The presenter uses a Google Chrome extension to overlay the live reactions from the audience, so not only can they adapt their presentation style, but students can see that it's not just them that are confused. Students can also comment questions/feedback live. We added a machine learning algorithm to measure the toxicity of comments to ensure only appropriate comments are shown. At the end of the event, the presenter can view a graph of all audience interactions and comments to see which parts of their presentation the students were most engaged with.

How we built it

To create rapid, super reliable, realtime connections we created a custom WebSocket server which (currently hosted in London). Building this from scratch gave us an immense amount of control over how our connections where handled and stored, this allowed amazing utilities such as the live graph drawer. Our frontend website is split into our landing page (to create QR codes for rooms), our voting page (used by the viewers) and our graph page. This design choice worked great for us during the hackathon as it allowed each section to be developed in parallel by a different team member. The graph utility is also built from scratch, with a lot of maths to scale and filter everything!

Challenges we ran into

Above all, we had the inevitable GitHub merge conflicts which we managed to sort through sword duel (aka going through the code together and untangling the mess). We also later realised that coding our statistics site from scratch to display our graphs may have been too massive of a project to undertake, however we pulled it off and are now super happy with it!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First and foremost, we are so infinitely proud of our team for working together so beautifully and keeping high spirits throughout. We also genuinely love our idea as this topic is something we had been very keen to explore previously so we were thrilled to hack it together today! Additionally, we managed to split the tasks super well and play to everyones strengths while ensuring we all had a reasonable amount of work.

What we learned

We learnt the importance of planning above all - as well as the fine details of communicating any technologies or plans with the team. We loved the chance to fine-tune our GitHub and coding skills while bouncing off questions and ideas off every member.

What's next for Vibe Check

We want to be part of the toolkit of every teacher, providing students and teachers with real-time feedback to improve quality of teaching and learning. Alongside this, we would expand into a dedicated app to be installed on student's devices. We would also like to expand into into other areas such as corporate board meetings, as we are ready to support any type of emoji reactions the presented wants to see. Big things ahead!