[51] - Vroom

Inspiration

• Frustration with ZOOM TECHNOLOGIES.
• Still does not feel flow with daily workflow and feel: it does not make things easier in, for example, academia.
• What my philosophy teacher called the zoomer prisoner dilemma: defecting (staying quiet and video off) has more payoff than cooperating (video on, at the very least).

What it does

• Create and manage classrooms.
• Streamlines classrooms and video sessions together, which enables a more interactive experience.
• Enables the owner to have more control over sessions, such as enforcing video to be on, so that students can't hide.
• Manages the virtual classroom to be the hub for all recording sessions (and past sessions)
• Chat feature for users to communicate with each other.

How we built it

• Websockets were used to facilitate two way communication for both the chat and images.
• Mongoose to store email/password data
• Boilerplate from https://github.com/sahat/hackathon-starter: brilliant way to make the workload faster.
• bootstrap/pug templating to prototype design sites

Challenges we ran into

• I am not the best designer: my limited experience with bootstrap/css certainly shows.
• Webcam technology not the best.
• Associating the new Classroom model with the User model, within a non relational context. (on ruby on rails, it is much easier)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Being able to manage and join classrooms page. It is one of the few moments where I think I am satisfied with my inability to design.
• Making a standardized way of having websockets communicate with each other to send camera frames and chat.
• Using pug templating to show data to a client, so that client can use it and interact with the other users.

What we learned

• Learned node.js, expressjs, and mongoose as a techstack. I am more familiar with django and ruby on rails.
• Using a nodejs MVC template from github and trying to manage the code. It's hard to understand code you didn't write.
• Learned a lot about websockets and client-server interactions.

What's next for Vroom

• Have a cleaner design/hire a designer.
• Marketing: audience is schools/colleges. Limit users to make 1-2 classrooms, and have big academic organizations pay for more classrooms.
• Combining the best of both worlds of zoom and google meet/classroom: recording sessions, audio/enforcing audio, turning in assignments, exam features, etc.

Built With

• mongoose
• node.js
• websockets