Note Global

Note Global is a collaborative, educational study platform where university students can contribute notes and help strengthen our collective knowledge and understanding.

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Inspiration

In this period of remote learning, we as students have found it far more difficult to find the traditional “student-teacher” dynamic of lowerclassmen seeking the academic wisdom and experience of upperclassmen. Our goal for Note Global was to provide a platform that can help reinvigorate this lost relationship. Through our platform, upperclassmen are able to transfer their knowledge by sharing their notes for courses they have taken. Lowerclassmen are able to draw from a vast pool of passed down knowledge, acquiring help that they may not be able to get otherwise. As freshmen, we understand the anxiety that comes with going to a new school, and so we offer the option for anonymity as to help students who may be shy. As students and our platform grows, with time we hope to surpass the virtual barriers that separate us and create a strong and interconnected community of life-long learners.

What it does

Through NoteGlobal, we hope to help to foster a more engaging and supportive environment for collaborative learning during these challenging times. Our platform offers the following features to promote an environment for collaboration and learning:

  • Note uploads for quick and efficient storage of knowledge"
  • Note posts with a comment section for discussion of content and material
  • Note ratings for distinction of superb notes
  • Cataloging hierarchy catered towards university communities and specific courses
  • Flagging posts/comments for going against academic dishonesty policies

How we built it

Our team decided to use React.js for the frontend and Firebase for the backend, with Google Realtime Database as our data store. We sought an architecture that would be simple to maintain, efficient to create, and responsive to real time changes.

Challenges we ran into

  • Dynamic page generation
  • Dealing with a large/nested database
  • Asynchronous callback functions

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Mobile friendly!
  • Serverless Architecture

What we learned

  • Working with non-relational databases
  • Routing
  • Base64 Data Compression and Storage Methods

What's next for Note Global

Our team is proud of what we’ve managed to create in such a short time, but our vision expands far beyond what we have down in code. In our brainstorming, we were ambitious in our idea-making, but realistic in prioritizing the core functionality of our app. The ideas we discarded, however, are not lost, but are now our goals for the future:

  • More robust user accounts and social features
  • Expansion to more universities
  • Improved PDF viewer and user interface
  • Support for more files like images, google slides, word docs, etc.
  • Shared notes for video links
  • Watch synchronized embedded videos (HTML5 player) in groups for real-time study sessions
  • Move from one-page web app to server side rendered for search optimization

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