Greenboard Flash

A web-based tool for making studying manageable for students

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Inspiration

Studying gets very overwhelming when large exams approach, such as midterms, APs, and finals. Even with a few weeks in advance, it's hard to manage the vast amount of information that needs to be reviewed. Telling yourself that you'll simply "study Biology" every day isn't enough and makes studying harder and more inefficient.

The recommended approach to fix this is to make a study plan. We wanted to automate this process by building a tool that enhances your studying.

What it does

Greenboard Flash is a browser-based tool that allows students to review content using both flashcards and a study plan. With the study plan, the student inputs the course content, what they are using to study, and the date of the exam. The app will spit back a calendar of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely) goals for each day so they know exactly what they are reviewing each day, making the studying process much more efficient and manageable.

How we built it

We used VueJS for the front-end, Django for the back-end, and PostgresSQL as our database management system. We chose these because one of us had never worked with Vue before, two of us had used Python, but only one knew Django, and none of us had worked with PostgresSQL - there was lots of room for learning.

Challenges we ran into

At first we could not decide whether to create a community-based tool or make it used for private use. With public flashcards and a content moderation control system, Greenboard Flash could become reliable for using other people's study sets. In the end, we decided to hold off on that feature and keep sets privately available due to time constraints.

We also had trouble figuring out a good backend. We did not know whether to use ReplitDB, Django, or Firebase in our tech stack. In the end we chose to use Django with PostgresSQL, and deploy it on Heroku.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Varun: I'm proud of the fact that I created a VueJS app in one weekend having never used it before. Silas: I'm proud of having been able to build the backend for this app in one weekend

What we learned

Varun: I learned VueJS! Silas: I learned how to deploy Django on Heroku (which is a lengthy process)

What's next for Greenboard Flash

We have big plans for expanding upon the features of Greenboard Flash. First of all, we would like to allow users to quiz themselves with the flashcards, edit flashcards, and increase the visibility of their flashcards to unlisted or public. Eventually, we might create a community system with reputation similar to StackExchange in order to have publicly available, verified cardsets that can be used for studying.

We also would like to build a mobile app for Greenboard Flash so that students do not need a computer to optimize their studying.

Greenboard Flash is part of a larger project we are working on called Greenboard, which will include other educational tools for students, teachers, and administrators, so we would like to create a login system that connects Greenboard Flash to Greenboard.

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