Maxoki | Devpost

Inspiration

School dropouts is an issue that happens all over the world. There are many reasons why young students decide to drop out and it is impossible to tackle all of the problems at once. One of the main reasons for dropouts is the feeling of inability to catch up with the course material and right now with the current pandemic, everything has shifted to online schooling. Many students are becoming desperate because they are not able to adapt to this new environment, worsening the situation… To prevent this issue, schools need to change the way they teach or the tools they use to teach, find an easier way for teachers to connect with the students, and allow students to collaborate with each other as if they were in a real classroom; or if they are already in the path of being a dropout then provide them a tool for them to adapt and reintegrate in a smoother way.
Another of my personal reason: I'm taking some french classes from a government program. In this class, I meet all kinds of people (old, young, technical, non-technical, married, single, etc), and one common factor I see in everyone sharing the online lecture is the difficulty of really being part of the class experience. Having a teacher that is not very technical plus the variety of people with a different skillset, ends up making the online classes very challenging and sometimes even stressful.

Providing excellent online lectures requires a lot of work and knowledge of different tools, however, I truly believe there should be a tool that eases the pressure for both students and teachers and make the online lecture flow in an easier and nicer way. That is what Maxoki tries to solve, and here we present what we have done for this hackathon:

What it does

Essentially, most teachers and students use three main components to provide/receive live online lectures: presentations (most popular), text editors, and whiteboards (least popular). Based on our experience, students are more likely to learn when the class is interactive and allows them to participate in one way or the other.

Maxoki is an easy to use online real-time collaborative platform that contains the most important tools (whiteboard, pdf, ppt, videos, images, polls, chat, annotations, etc.) for a teacher to teach and the students to learn, all in one single place, removing the stress and need of using multiple apps on both the teacher’s and the student’s side.

The platform is divided into different important sections, each of them having its own set of functionality.

As observed in the previous image:

Tabs: Allows the user to change between different tabs/mode/views, that support a variety of formats such as doc, ppt, pdf, whiteboard, etc.
Tools: The available tools that are present globally throughout the different tabs. This includes (pen, eraser, text, images/videos, color palette, zoom in/out, fullscreen, dragging, undo, shapes, etc). This part provides the necessary tools the teacher might need for an excellent lecture.
Layers: This is one unique aspect of Maxoki, that allows the users to hide or view the teachers’ notes or his own. This makes it so that students can follow the teacher’s lecture but at the same time write down their own notes.
Social: Contains the tools where social interaction can be done. Such tools are chats, polls, emotes, activities, etc, that might involve some form of interaction between the presenters and the participants.

Additionally, there is also a system for managing different roles.

Host: The creator and the one that can control everything inside his lecture.
Editor: Basically, the co-host. The person that can edit and help with the lecture and presentation.
Participant: This would serve as the student role, where they are not able to edit the lecture's content but will be able to write their own notes.
Viewer: Only able to view the lecture content.
Blocked: Blocked and kicked from the presentation, will not be able to access the link.

This is all real-time and collaborative, students and teachers will be in sync and enjoy and interact with the lecture's material being presented. Teachers can get creative and add different media files (gif/videos/etc) to make the lecture much more interesting and students will be able to share notes among themselves and motivate each other to continue.

There's still a lot to work on and this might not really solve the issue for dropouts, but if it is a tool that can ease the pain or the stress of the parties involved, it is for sure something we want to bet on!

How we built it

Reactjs, konvajs, and socket.io for the frontend
Node.js, express.js, and socket.io for the backend
Mongodb for the DB.

Challenges we ran into

We noticed this hackathon a little late and did not have enough time to prepare a better product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to participate and submit something before the deadline.

What's next for Maxoki

Maxoki is far from finished, more tools that are useful for teachers and students will need to be added, and hopefully ends up being a full system that everyone enjoys using. A go-to place for teachers wanting to provide excellent education and a companion for fellow students trying to progress.

Now, lets maximize the learning experience, oki?