WeNote

The Notes We Share

Comment 2

Inspiration

Our app is inspired by students’ personal experiences when taking in-person lectures. Note-taking is always more of a challenge than what people normally think: “I try to keep up with the professor, but they speak too quickly”; “Sometimes when I’m writing the notes, my mind draws a blank. I try to remember what I wanted to write; meanwhile the professor moves on to another important point”, “I’m a student who requires note-taking, I cannot do it by myself”...

According to the research on student notetaking by the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching of the University of Michigan, “Several studies indicate that students have difficulty organizing lecture material and identifying main points…” “Students say they experience the most difficulty with lecturers who speak too quickly or inaudibly…”

Additionally, according to Statistics Canada, there were a considerable amount and even more people with disabilities than those without disabilities whose educational level is a postsecondary certificate or below. To accommodate those students with disabilities who find it difficult to take notes in Canada, the PSE institutions suggest students with disabilities submit a request form for the notetaker to create electronic/photocopied notes and deliver them to the students with disabilities.

link

In order to make it more convenient for all to catch up with everything in the lecture and help students with disability to get access to the notes more easily and quickly, our team is developing an app called “WeNote”, which aims to help students solve all these issues and create a more inclusive community for students.

What it does

WeNote is an app that encourages students to have a social learning experience by providing them with an open note-sharing platform to increase engagement, promote collaboration, and build community through lecture notes and online study discussions.

How we built it

  • Figma
  • Django
  • CSS
  • Github
  • python
  • html

Challenges we ran into

Our team is composed of 4 beginner-level hackers. As such, we are not super experienced with using GitHub, Django, etc., resulting in us not having enough time to build more advanced functions that we had envisioned such as inline comments and a upvote/downvote system.

In terms of challenges during development, we had a lot of trouble configuring PDFs both in terms of uploading and rendering. We received so much support from mentors and are so so thankful for their help!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Figma design of the web
  • Functionality of the design
  • Time management
  • Collaboration
  • Workload division

What we learned

Through this development experience, we became comfortable with various Git commands as well as the basic Django app structure. Aside from the more technical side of things, we learned how important it is to have a plan right from the beginning, but at the same time flexibly adapt to cahnges as life (or in this case, the debug screen) throws curveballs at you!

What's next for WeNote

In the foreseeable future, we will develop a feature for students to add inline comments to each other's uploaded notes. As well, we will continue to increase accessibility and inclusivity by incorporating built-in functionalities like translating, text-to-speech, etc.

As for our long-term goals, we aim to develop our figma prototype into a full-feature complimentary mobile app to maximize ease of access; we also hope to integrate login with university databases and associated security features.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates