Inspiration
Especially at a time of social-isolation and unprecedented changes to the institutions of learning, students are often left drowning in the dread and anxiety of their work with no quick, easy-access place they go to seek help. Such was the case of one of our teammates who, while having to balance various extracurricular activities, studying for standardized testing, personal academic endeavors, and rigorous school work, found it difficult to find quick, accessible tutoring to help him better understand what he was learning at school that conformed to his busy schedule. When searching online, he found that most services either provided simple tutorials, neglecting the student the ability to ask questions, or required inflexible appointments that conflicted with his other priorities. The need for a fast, easy-to-use platform that provides a streamlined method of communication and connection between students and tutors had presented itself, and upon presenting this idea to his teammates, they decided change was paramount. Introducing… 22ring!
From a technical standpoint, our biggest inspiration for this idea was the works of uber and Omegle. We thought of the good these platforms had and wondered if there was a way for a similar idea to inflict positive change in the field of education, resulting in us arriving at our current project.
What it does
Our website is able to instantly match students that need tutoring in a certain subject area with students that can offer help in a certain subject area. In order to sign up to be a tutor on our website, a prospective tutor must go through a thorough registration process to avoid uncertainty. Also, when a tutor and tutee are both paired through our website, a google meet link is generated and our own bot is placed in the google meet to monitor the length of the meeting. Afterward, the tutoring session is finished, the number of hours taught gets added onto the tutor's total number of hours taught and the tutee is able to rate the quality of teaching the tutor provided to provide a quality measurement system. Lastly, as a tutor's work increases in quality and quantity, the tutor is able to level up in 'rank' from a bronze tier to a silver tier to a gold tier to a platinum tier, and eventually to a diamond tier. By doing this, tutors will be motivated by an honor system to teach as best and as much as possible and tutors are given easy access to providing tutoring while at the same time tutees are given easy access to getting tutoring all at the click of a button.
How we built it
Our app consists of 3 main components: the user interface developed using React JavaScript, our custom Google Meet API, and our Google Cloud Firestorm database.
Challenges we ran into
Our team mainly consists of beginner hackathon competitors, so we ran into many challenges dealing with GitHub, react js, and firebase. One of our initial GitHub challenges was not able to sync changes in the project among everyone's local repositories, which we ended up dealing with by converting to vs code and using the built-in GitHub feature. Another challenge we ran to initially was not able to read and write into firebase, which we ended up solving by taking the help of a mentor in the who-hacks discord server.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Some accomplishments that we're proud of are that we successfully implemented a working react application, got the google-meet bot to work in logging the number of minutes each session took, and got most of the forms working with the firebase database and ready to be used in a real-life-scenario.
What we learned
Through this experience, a majority of us have had our first hackathon experience. With that being said, we learned many new specifics with website-development and React-JS in particular that we didn't already know. Additionally, we learned how to function efficiently as a team with a low amount of time to finish the project.
What's next for 2turing
In the future we plan on adding a variety of features that improve user experience and expand the bounds of what our app can do. Future ideas include:
- Add group meetings feature
- Make it so that we promote new tutors but also make it easy for our users to find more experienced ones (uber-esque)
- Give basic test to tutors to determine qualification to tutor on a subject and use that as a factor to sort tutors (higher test on score = higher on list for recommended tutors)
- Make tutor the host of meeting
- Make it so that tutors have to have a minimum ranking to stay tutoring on the website or their account gets disabled or removed for a certain amount of time
- Make student ratings too (uber-esque)
- Report button for tutor
This project is far from over, we all believe that it has many areas to improve and could potentially provide some use in the real world if worked on as a side project over time.
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