Kelp-it-Simple | Devpost

Welcome to our Home Page! Here you can click on the category of skills you wish to learn!
Welcome to our many resources! Click the one you want to explore or even add your own!
Here's a resource we have under languages. Add a comment or read some left by others!
Read the reviews left by our community!
Join our community by adding resources to help others!
We hope you find Kelp-it-Simple useful!!!

Inspiration

Kelp-it-Simple was inspired by our own experiences trying to self-learn new skills. Often, the time we spend researching how to best learn something overshadows the time we actually spend learning it. What’s more, the amount of research and conflicting information from different resources, such as Reddit, Quora, forums and the like often leaves a new learner confused on where to start. Kelp-it-Simple is our solution to this issue.

What it does

Kelp It Simple is an educational hub website that contains free resources for learning, currently sorted into three main categories: languages, arts and design, and computer science. Each category displays a list of online resources, ranging from Youtube tutorials to online textbooks. Resources can be filtered by type (video, website, or book) and by rating, or the user can search for them by name.

The rating and comments system is entirely user-generated. New learners are able to see reviews and comments of other users that provide feedback on resources. This allows the best resources to shine through, as decided by the community. Learners themselves are encouraged to leave their own review, which will become public immediately upon being submitted.

Users can also add their own new resources to a category, and just like the comments system, a newly added resource will immediately become publicly viewable.

How we built it

Kelp It Simple is a website built mainly in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with the backend powered by a server run by the express.js framework.

Challenges we ran into

One of the earliest challenges was simply choosing an IDE on which we could work collaboratively. Our first attempts using repl.it failed due to lag, but we quickly solved the problem by switching to VS Code’s Live Share extension.

Creating the review system was challenging as well, as we needed a way for the front end to connect with and return data back to the backend server. Normally, the front-end can easily fetch data from the server using HTTP GET requests, but in order to save a review we needed to create a custom server to handle POST requests. We tried many different ways of making this happen before settling on an express.js server, which allowed us to receive a POST request and save a review to a local file in the server.

Regarding our pitch, we encountered challenges with animating the elements, editing video, and brainstorming the best way to present our awesome new project. Nevertheless, we were able to find joy in discovering new tools to work with in creating our graphics. Our pitch was the result of numerous edits and practices to make it perfect.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although we encountered numerous challenges in the initial stages of our project (such as changing programming platforms and unfamiliar languages), we persevered and were able to push out an amazing project. All teammates were able to learn new skills, whether it be hard skills such as learning new syntax or soft skills such as teamwork and grit. We are proud that the styling of the website looks great and that the backend (made from express.js) worked fantastic despite the majority of the team not being familiar with the framework. Plus, all of this was done in around 12 hours, allowing us to get 2 full nights of sleep!

What we learned

Kelp-It-Simple taught us to be adaptive, to work around problems, and to believe that every problem always has a solution. It taught us technical skills, like how to set up our own custom HTTP server and how to make POST requests to save a user’s input on a permanent, globally visible file. Creating the pitch for it was also a nice refresher in video editing and slides animation.

What's next for Kelp It Simple

Kelp It Simple was designed to be adaptive and to easily accommodate the addition of new data, new resources, and even whole new categories. It is a framework that grows exponentially more useful as more users add to its content.

With more resources to search through, one next step would be to add more filters and more data to each resource to filter by. For example, we could add filters for difficulty or time investment to make it even easier for users to find the right starting point. Currently, Kelp-It-Simple is hosted on a localhost server and is not publicly viewable, but because it was built using an express.js framework it would be easy to host the server on a service like Render to open it to the public.