DiscMap | Devpost

What one of our mind map screens look like.
The home screen of Discmap. Purposefully simple in order to provide the quickest start to a mind map session.

Inspiration

Imagine sitting in a classroom which is currently engaging in an exciting discussion. You just thought of that amazing point that will pivot the entire discussion and you raise your hand to share. 10 minutes and 6 other people later, you finally get called on only for your message to become invalid and forgotten. This has happened to best of us, and Discmap solves this problem by allowing you to contribute, as well as respond to, ideas.

What it does

Discmap is an interactive mind map that allows you to contribute and respond to the discussion without having to wait for a teacher to call on you.

How we built it

Discmap was built using firebase database, firebase web hosting, and javascript. We used Firebase to store and update the mind maps and the hosting to put the website up. We specifically designed Discmap to be a simple as possible to make it quick to setup and get started.

Challenges we ran into

Discmap utilizes go.js, which is a new API that visualizes data. Unfortunately, their documentation is very lacking, which led to us having to spend hours reverse engineering specifics components in order to achieve what we wanted. A specific example would be implementing the modal that prompts you for information. We lost functionality of other components while implementing this because of the undocumented nature of the code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Discmap started out with hopes of being the next big idea that would propel us to success. Unfortunately, we were perplexed as to where to start and our first efforts proved to be futile. We decided to put the project on the back burner, but here at CincyHacks, we brought our idea to life. What started out as a project too big to complete, ended up becoming a great hackathon experience.

What's next for DiscMap

We plan on implementing further features that would benefit the teachers. Knowing how many students are in the session or having all the names on hand are examples of features that would greatly improve the quality of our application.