Wise Up with Verizon

An educational app that provides curated solution to all your needs so that you can put your time and effort where it matters!

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Inspiration

Our team focused on the topic- “Digital Education”. When one thinks about digital education, they think of websites like Kahoot!, Coursera and Khan Academy. They are great educational resources and help us learn many new things, but how many of you can confidently say that you found and learnt exactly what you were looking for? How many of you can confidently say that you have never spent hours in the internet just to find that one small issue that you can't find the perfect solution too? How many of you can confidently say that you have not spent hundreds on that one certification that you have yet to complete?

This is where we bring in Wise Up with Verizon

What it does

Wise Up with Verizon is a first of its kind app which provides curated visual and contextual answers to all your queries so that you can put your time and effort where it matters! Our team of specialized professionals scours through the internet on a regular basis finding the best videos addressing topics ranging from everyday education to niche problems of everyday life. These topics are selected through analyzing data on google and having regular surveys in the application asking users their next learning journey. For low-income households, our application provides multiple profiles in a single device which can help many people to learn from the same device hence saving a major cost.

On top of helping people learn, we offer various AP/CLEPS credit coursework through which you can kickstart your college journey right through your home. If you are a college student or a working professional, you can select from our various company certified programs offering certificates, awards and badges. The application also keeps track of your progress and provides a schedule so that you can put your time and effort where it actually matters!

How we built it

The application is mainly built using CSS, R and JavaScript using a simple app builder called jotforms. R here is used for Data Analysis and creating reports and providing a streamlined schedule. JavaScript was used for the backend web development and designing of the application. CSS is used for the final touches such as adding the gradient and fixing the shapes/color scheme of the application.

Challenges we ran into

We initially thought to use references from existing applications and create a simple application using google slides. But upon finishing the project, we realized that it was not what we envisioned for. So we had to rebuild the whole thing, this time with all the coding involved in one night.

While building the application, we came across various issues, primarily: -

  1. Jot forms is extremely responsive to JavaScript and CSS, but for some reason it does not want to work with R. Getting jot forms to integrate with R platform was a mess of using unreasonable amount of extensions and add-ons which are still finnicky in some cases.
  2. Jot form advertises many excellent features such as report creation and data analysis, but we could just not get them to work with our application. It took several hours just to get the report to accept inputs and then several more to insert analysis formulas.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The whole journey of the hackathon was something that we are proud of. We are a team of three on which two have never participated in a hackathon and have little to no coding experience. Therefore, pulling this off was nothing less than a miracle. We are also extremely proud of our teamwork, responsiveness and enthusiasm of each and everyone involved in this project.

What we learned

  1. A whole new realm of data optimization and analysis formulas.
  2. Jotforms.
  3. More about our teammates
  4. How many people search for some sort of help everyday (5 Billion!).

What's next for Wise Up with Verizon

Wise Up right now is just a small domino which has the potential to bring about an educational revolution. Making education available to everyone in little to no cost will not only increase the literacy rate around the world, the easy accessibility to knowledge will bring forth never seen before discoveries and inventions in record breaking time.

Further, by partnering up with Verizon and its vast network, we are confident that we can make education accessible to places where it was only seen as a dream. We also plan to make special devices that are integrated with the app on low cost and partnering up with many non-profit organizations to provide those devices to low-income families.

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