soful

(source organization for unique learning) soful, bridging education gaps since 2022

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Inspiration

The topic of how we can use technology to create more equality within countries inspired us to think of how we felt unequal in our own lives and how we could minimize it.

What it does

Soful is a web-based navigational tool in which the user would input their learning style(s) and soful would organize web sources and other educational platforms that would fit under the rubric of their specific style(s).

How we built it

Using Next.js, we constructed a working prototype for our vision of soful.

The links that contain the children subjects or recommended resources were made possible by dynamic routes, and we decided to store the data for each subject within .json files.

Challenges we ran into

The most significant challenge was during our attempt to manually store some resources along with their evaluations of the suited learning style. Neither of us had any knowledge about databases, so we decided to approach this problem by storing the data within a collection of .json files. The part that really brought us to a challenge was rendering a link which displayed the title of the child subject and lead to the proper URL. First, we tried to find a way to retrieve the title of a child, but we couldn't really find a way to do so. We then tried to add another object within the .json files that contained the corresponding titles of the children, but we couldn't figure out a way to merge the items in each object into a single link. This specific idea to resolving the issue ended up taking the most amount of time, as we were fully confident that somehow there was a way to merge the items of the two objects together. Finally, we took a step back to attempt to see areas of potential solutions from the broadest scope, in which we finally found a way to resolve the issue by merging the path of the file with the title into a single object and collecting all of these into an array. This had caused us to learn that when an issue arises, consider a wide range of possible solutions even if there's confidence in a solution that at the moment doesn't work.

Another major challenge worth mentioning was our inexperience in web development. A lot of the concepts that come with web development were unknown or confusing to us, and we had difficulty understanding how these concepts worked. However, through this hackathon, we were able to significantly develop a better understanding of these concepts given that this hackathon has provided an opportunity to apply these concepts in a realistic setting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Given that both of us are inexperienced in web development, we are proud of being able to produce a working prototype with web development.

What we learned

We learned how to use React and Next.js and how these frameworks function. We also developed a better understanding of Javascript, HTML, and CSS through our experience in this hackathon. We also discovered that the process of brainstorming proves to be a lot more effective than we previously thought, and we gained experience in collaboratively working on a project like this.

What's next for soful

An expansion of our resource library would provide users with more options and freedom of choice of how they want to learn. Added selections of learning styles to better realize the individual and specific ways different people learn.

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