Points And Me | Devpost

Inspiration

Did your teachers in grade school ever reward you for doing well in class with stars and/or stickers? Some of our teachers went beyond this and rewarded their students with points that could be spent on rewards, such as pizza, movie days, and toys. This was the original idea for Points and Me; to create a elegant, approachable, and friendly system for rewarding students for excelling in academics.

What it does

Points and Me as a website allows teachers to create an account. The teacher can then register a class, and register students for said class. For each class, they can setup achievements and tasks for the students to accomplish, how much each achievement/task is worth in points, redeemable rewards, and how much said rewards are worth. Students can login and track the achievements and tasks they have accomplished, how many points they have to spend, and purchase the rewards using their points. Once a student has made a purchase, it is added to the teacher’s fulfillment queue and removed at the teacher’s request.

How we built it

Points and Me was built using a Google Firebase backend and AngularJs as a frontend framework. Google Firebase was chosen for its ease of use, speedy setup time (essential for hackathons), scalability, and reliability. AngularJs was chosen for its scalable and easy to use content organization. Both Google Firebase and AngularJs were chosen because we all wanted to explore new frameworks for achieving our task.

Challenges we ran into

As with any group trying to learn and use new frameworks, we faced a few major hurdles in the learning process. Working with AngularJs’ views and model system, and general CSS woes were major roadblocks for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Ultimately, we got things sorted out and when things finally started coming together, it was extremely rewarding to see all the bits and pieces work like a clock. There’s always a point in every project where you step back and appreciate what you’ve made and see it less as a problem, and more as a product that could change the world.

What we learned

We’re excited to say as individuals and as a group, we all learned the following: Google Firebase, AngularJs, brainstorming, marketing, choosing and narrowing features for a minimal viable product, running on little to no sleep, and a little about each other.

What's next for Points And Me

Of course with most projects coming out of hackathons, the first step is polishing our project to a mirror shine. We would love to finalize and add many of the features that didn’t get completed/added in during the hackathon. Looking farther into the future, we truly believe a system like Points and Me could help motivate and push many students to be better. We’d love to start looking into talking with institutions in order to made the signup and login process much more elegant and integrated into student life. Automatic class creation and student inclusion, a phone companion app to remind students of their classes and homework, etc. We’d also love to expand the concept to possibly change all levels of education; for instance, imagine if we could automatically grade math papers and, using machine learning, find out what areas of math a student is more or less proficient at? With said data, we could tailor course curriculums to be more personalized, and set up reward incentives for helping students become better than they would otherwise be in a regular academic system. The sky for changing the way we teach the future generation is limitless, and we’re excited to keep exploring the frontier.