🚘 MEET VROOM. 🚘
Zoom wasn't built for online learning; but it's the most used meeting platform for the 1.3 billion children learning online. According to The United States Census Bureau in 2020, 63% of students felt the quality of online learning was worse than classroom learning.
That’s where Vroom comes in.
Vroom was designed to bridge the gap between the screen and the virtual classroom by making it easier to communicate with and get support from your tutors.
😎 How did we do it? 😎
Vroom sounds pretty great, right? One problem: Zoom doesn't have an API to manage live meetings. To get around this, we used a Selenium bot to monitor the Zoom chat, which interacts via Express Node.js with our React-powered Electron app. So the student can communicate more comfortably with the teacher on Zoom, and the teacher can better support the student on Vroom.
How does it work?
For students
🙋♂️Ask your Questions Anonymously🤷♀️
Ever felt embarrassed to ask a question in class? With Vroom, just type !anon and your question - Vroom will ask it for you.
🔡Get translations in real time🔣
27% of Australian students have English as a second language, so it can be hard for them to keep up. With Vroom, you can translate to English directly in the chat.
🚀Let your tutor know they're going too slowly or that you need help - embarrassment free.🚀
Using the !slower, !faster, and !help commands, students can tell the tutor to drop or pick up the pace or get help without the publicity - only the tutor can see the message.
For Tutors
📈Track your Students' Progress📉
With the !progress command, teachers can see what students are working on, allowing them to pace lessons accordingly. On the student end, they can share this important information with clogging up the chat.
📊Build and Monitor Polls📊
Vroom allows tutors to send poll questions to the chat, and collect student responses in the chat using the !vote command. This streamlines the polling process and makes it easier than ever before for students to participate.
📋Build and View Lesson Plans📋
Teachers can create new plans for lessons, including topics and allocated times, all in Vroom! They can also import existing plans into the app.
Plus some other handy features:
!now- find out where the class is up to in the lesson plan!attend- get the zoom meeting attendance list!commands- get a list of the all the commands available in Vroom
👾 Who else would use it? 👽
By 2025, the online education market is projected to be worth around $325 billion! (Chernev, 2021)
Our main audience is students, teachers, and tutors, but Vroom doesn't stop there - here are some other ways Vroom can assist:
1 . Conducting votes on agenda items or motions in business meetings anonymously - over 40% of Fortune 500 companies use it to train their staff (Chernev, 2021)
2 . Tracking progress on tasks in meetings
3 . Helping cross-cultural teams achieve more with the in-chat translation feature
🧮 Our Stack 🧮
- React for the frontend
- Bootstrap for frontend styling
- Electron to create a desktop application
- Express.js to manage the local backend
- Selenium to interact with the Zoom Web Client
- Google Translate API to translate messages
🌍 So What's Next? 🌍
- Allow multiple Vroom Assistants to join the same call so that they can assist lecturers with large (30+) class sizes.
- Integrate Vroom functionality with breakout rooms, so the bot can move in between breakout rooms and assist students even when they’re not in the main room.
Vroom is a platform that provides an interface for interacting with Zoom live meetings through live visuals and a chatbot. We’ve built out the foundations, the limits of what you can build on top of it is really up to your imagination. 🌌🌌
Social Impact
According to a 2017 study by Australian mental health organization Headspace, up to 79% of students aged 17-25 reported feeling anxious, and these levels have continued to climb during the transition to online learning. Vroom reduces student anxiety levels by making classes simpler to navigate and more enjoyable to attend.
For the 27% of Australian tertiary students that have English as a second language, online learning can create an extra barrier to education. Vroom’s translate feature makes online classrooms a more welcoming and accessible environment for these students.
Who We Are
Andrew Esteban
I have been a lecturer, teaching assistant and tutor at the University of Sydney since 2019, and have also worked on a casual basis at Sydney Grammar School since 2018. As an educator for both high school and university level students, I have really struggled to maintain the same levels of engagement online as I did in person. This has not been helped by Zoom’s limited set of features for online learning, which creates even more barriers between myself and the students. I wanted to use this hackathon as a chance to build features onto Zoom that I feel should have been there from the onset, including the ability to anonymously ask questions, translate messages, and discretely ask for help.
Lilian Hunt
I teach a variety of computer science subjects at the University of Sydney. I have been teaching classes since 2019, so the change to online learning was difficult. I struggled to get students to engage. Only able to use Zoom, options were limited. I particularly found that students were hesitant to engage and ask questions, preferring to keep their cameras and microphones off. In particular I really found it difficult to pace my lessons and know when students have finished a question or are still working on it. Some used the public thumbs up feature but most were hesitant to engage. I also found students asking questions to me privately really frustrating because then I had to repeat the question. They were then also missing out the opportunity for other students to answer their questions and learn from each other. Going into this hackathon, I really wanted to create a tool to help to address these issues and use them in my virtual classroom everyday.
Sammi Millett
I work with Accenture’s Women In Code program to host outreach presentations and workshops designed to encourage high school aged girls to explore career paths in STEM fields, particularly technology. During the shift to online learning, I struggled with maintaining high levels of engagement amongst students, and was frustrated with the limited interactive features provided by online learning tools.
References 📚
Chernev, B. (2021). 29 Astonishing E-learning Statistics For 2021. Retrieved 28 August 2021, from https://techjury.net/blog/elearning-statistics/#gref
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.