WorkFlow

Inspiration

In order for us to truly contribute to social good, we wanted to work on a project that is accessible to all students and classrooms regardless of financial status. We wanted to work on a project that can help cultivate an important life skill in each individual student and possibly make a positive difference in their education. And so, we began to create WorkFlow.

Whether you were grouped with people you can not cooperate with or a teacher gave everyone in your group the same grade (including the slacker), we have all had bad experiences working in a group. However, team work is a life skill that must be cultivated in school because it can determine how one transitions into their work life.

Here are some of the problems we want to tackle:

Organizing groups

A teacher may not know how different students work and therefore have difficulty grouping students together. Even after familiarizing with the students and their work ethics, teachers may still have difficulty deciding how to group different students. (We want to be the tinder for setting up group projects.)

Transparent Grading

It's difficult grading a group project. The lines between what each team member did can sometimes become blurry. We want to make it clearer to the teacher who did what for the group project.

What it does

Step One
We need to collect data about each student before we can determine their work ethic. Before the first group project, the student will submit a survey to help classify the type of team member he or she is.
Step Two
The teacher will add projects for their classes. They will also have the option to setup milestones for each project.
Step Three
The teacher will also decide how to setup the groups. For example the teacher can decide whether to setup each group with a mix of different work ethics or to separate the procrastinators from everyone else.
Step Four
The students will input what percentage of each milestone they believe they contributed to. Each team mate will also have to approve this.
Step Five
the students will rate their team mates on their work ethics based on their experience on the project. The percentage of work that the student contributed towards the project will also contribute to determining the student's work ethic.
Step Six
The teacher will grade the project with the ability to see exactly what each student contributed.

How we built it

We decided that a web application was the most accessible option for our vision. We developed the front end of the application with Javascript and the backend with Java.

Challenges we ran into

Although we decided a web application would be the most accessible option, none of our team members had experience creating a web application. This made it very difficult and slow to move forward on our project. The majority of our time was spent learning and catching up. We stayed patient and tried our best to apply what we could learn.

What we learned

We have learned a lot about web development from this experience. From learning how to create an expanding button to connecting front end to back end, we researched and learned plenty.

What's next for WorkFlow

We hope to develop our web application further and to add all the features that are currently missing. We believe that WorkFlow can be a small and easy step for classrooms to improve and become more efficient with technology.

Built With

• java
• javascript