Inspiration
Taking notes has always been hard. With everything that has happened, like quarantine, new students have a difficult time learning how to take notes. So naturally we turn to our fellow peers. Normally to share notes, you would just email them to each other. However, what if an entire class wants to share notes? You don't even have to go that far, what if it's just a couple friends. And if they each have different questions? Not so easy. Other platforms have way too many distractions. How many times have you found yourself opening instagram to text a friend, only to get distracted and end up spending way too much time on the app? Our website allows you to easily solve all these problems, and truly get the best out of your studying time.
What it does
StudyPineapple is a distractionless social media platform for students who are looking for an easy way to share/receive notes and get extra help outside of school.
You can create and join classes through codes. Each class has a forum which allows you to post questions about things. You can also post notes and audio files, with the ability to transcribe them.
There is also a room system to directly talk to peers on the website. You can ask someone to join via your code, then talk with them. This can help you avoid distractions when you take out your phone to facetime, etc.
The colour scheme chosen for StudyPineapple is meant to be easy on the eyes. Studying for long periods of time can be hard on your eyes, so choosing our colour scheme is important. We chose a light blue colour scheme, since it's very familiar and won't hurt your eyes.
How we built it
StudyPineapple was built with react as our frontend, to have a lot of nice animations. And nodejs/express was used as our backend. We also used websockets in the form of socket.io for our live chat and sqlite to hold user data and forum post information
Challenges we ran into
The scope of the project. We originally planned loads of features, however we learned quickly that the time crunch we were in wouldn't allow that. We eventually toned it down to the more important ideas, and overcame this hurdle.
Learning how to use databases. For example, the biggest challenge that I faced while using sql was learning how to properly plan and design how the different tables would relate to each other. However we eventually figured it out, deciding to leverage tables styles such as "one to many" to minimize the amount of processing required by our backend servers
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One of the more notable things that I developed the opportunity to learn about through this hackathon was Google Cloud AI and specifically Googles speech to text API.
We were able to use machine learning and google cloud API to convert speech to text, allowing users to record their teachers or professors speech and convert it to a convenient text file, great for taking notes.
What we learned
We are proud of our use of sql tables, and the way they were used in our program. We feel that we learned a lot about the complexities of sql databases and how experimenting with different ways of storing data can lead to huge advancements in efficiency or general usability of data.
We also learned many different ways to utilise CSS to make your website pop. We were able to include many different animations in our website.
What's next for StudyPineapple
Creating a login system for students, at the current moment all we have is usernames that store the data.
Peer tutoring video chat section. You have the ability to start a video chat session for others to join, so you can have a more in depth study session
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