Converse App

Converse is students audio-only platform for hosting school discussions, debates and quizzes.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the audio social platforms out there that allowed people to come together to have conversations. We realized that with the pandemic students are bored at home with nothing to push them to learn so we came up with a platform specifically for students that are audio-only, much like a podcast in which you can hop in and talk with other students or even form study rooms with classmates to learn and exchange ideas on certain subjects all through their earbuds while performing other activities. Exactly like listening to music but this time you are learning.

What it does

Converse link is an audio-only platform for students to talk, discuss class subjects or homework, develop ideas about a topic, share stories about anything school-related while meeting like-minded students from around the world. Basically, students can jump in and out of different rooms or discussions to listen or talk on different subjects anytime anywhere.

We believe that if students could learn the way they listen to music, students will improve their learning skills and also articulate course content in their own words. It's not only about listening, we make sure students participate in discussions to better their public speaking skills, there's no video or photo so feel free to express yourself in an avatar. The privacy of students is our concern therefore all they need to signup for is a nickname and avatar.

In addition to student groups; our app is the perfect platform for educational institutions to host debates, quizzes, and discussions. And also, in these covid times when admissions and learning is all online; our app is a platform that can be leveraged by freshmen to hear and learn from their seniors.

Our application can also be used by universities to connect students with potential recruiters by hosting discussion and AMA sessions regarding recruitments.

Use cases of audio-rooms (for best experience use earbuds :)

  • Making private study room with classmates
  • Hosting discussion on any classroom topic or educational topics (eg. What is the future of education post-pandemic) privately or publicly where any student can hop-in and participate
  • Organizing student debates which is moderated by hosts and the winner is chosen by the audience
  • Quizzes
  • Interactive educational podcasts
  • Homework question & answer
  • 1-on-1 or 1-to-many tutoring

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

As a team, we had diverse skillsets and had to work with a tech stack that required us to be innovative with how we collaborated. Creating the database for our REST-API proved difficult in our short time span. We were not very familiar with cloud services either, so connecting to Cloud SQL and deployment was challenging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We were able to complete the prototype, a fully functional frontend, and a complete backend with databases.
  • Despite being in different time zones, we were able to have a smooth collaboration

What we learned

  • About live-audio streaming APIs.
  • About CockroachDB(though we were not able to use it, we were able to get it working locally)
  • About documenting our API
  • About deploying to the cloud(Google cloud

What's next for Converse App

We plan to release the final version to the AppStore and market it through educational institutions, student clubs, and influencers. Build more room features, to support debates and quizzes and add premium functionality, including an option to record discussions as podcasts.

It will also be great to improve on the explore section using so that when students open the app it will show the rooms that are perfectly tailored to their interests. And with ML/AI, we can add another feature of suggested rooms according to the student’s interests and categories it most interacted with.

The future is exciting :)

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