SlugNote | Devpost

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Inspiration

Imagine an app that introduces a platform for a virtual community consisting of students sharing the knowledge that they accumulate throughout their time in college. This app uses the fundamental belief that education is a universal right which should not be limited to the few lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend a college or university.

What it does

This app provides a platform for students to find notes relevant to their courses while simultaneously allowing them to make their notes publicly accessible to other learners. By allowing the user to search through colleges and courses, a student who is enrolled in a class could look at notes from a lecture they missed, or even compare their notes to the notes uploaded. It would also be incredibly useful for students to have a saved set of notes on their phone when midterm and final season come around.

By providing tags for each upload, along with a search option, we will allow users to find notes for courses they are not currently enrolled in. This may be useful for when you are searching for a subject that is supposedly taught very well at certain campuses. For instance, a Computer Engineering course at Stanford could provide an interesting perspective into what students are truly learning. In addition, this app could be used to weigh the true difficulty of a course a student is debating to take; rather than asking around and receiving multiple answers from different students, an individual could take the initiative to look at student notes and determine for themselves if they are prepared for a course of that difficulty.

How we built it

We developed the front-end of this android app using android-studio, which we coded using .xml and Java. The back-end of this app used Mongoose database and was coded in JavaScript in order to communicate with the servers, as well as the front-end of our app.

Challenges we ran into

Our team's lack of experience with app development worked as the most difficult challenge our team experienced during this Hack-a-Thon. None of our team members had any previous experience with Android-Studio, while only one of us had ever even developed an app before. This essentially made it so that the first day of the Hack-a-Thon was completely spent climbing over the learning-hump which comes with most coding languages. Once we had the basic knowledge of how to develop our app, we found ourselves in the middle of the weekend and were forced to prioritize which aspects of our app we wanted to spend time to implement. The next challenge we are anticipating to face is connecting and communicating between the front and the back-end of our app which will also require determining how we would interact with our servers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In terms of software, we are very proud of the fact that our team was able to collectively learn how to work with .xml and a GUI interface in such a short amount of time. Additionally, we are proud of the conceptual strides that we've taken in the applications for SlugNote. This app started out as a simple idea for sharing notes and with time and consultation, we have though of multiple additional features and endless benefits that this application would provide.

What we learned

We learned that with time and dedication, it is indeed possible to create an app within a single weekend. With close to zero experience, extensive communication throughout the weekend between the team members allowed us to become very acquainted with Android-Studio. We also learned the level of excitement shown by fellow students about this app. In fact, most students who heard our idea had multiple suggestions for extra functionalities and applications.

What's next for SlugNote

There are many directions we want to take this app. The first step we will likely take will be to further develop the app in order to implement full functionality of all features from our initial plan. We would also love to implement this app on a platform compatible with Apple devices. Once we have all desired features up and running smoothly, we have discussed as a team that we plan to speak in front of our lectures to let our peers know about this app and that we, as fellow students, plan on posting our notes from that course. Ensuring them that if they ever miss a lecture, our notes will be available to them via this app. Past this step, we would be interested in reaching out to other Universities and asking them to partake in this note-sharing network.