Lecturistic | Devpost

Inspiration

We've all been there - you miss a class (whether by accident, or by choice), and you wish you could listen to the lecture. But alas... there are no lecture recordings to be found anywhere!

That's where the foundation of our idea came to life. We wanted to create an easy way to give students access to lecture recordings in all their classes. But we didn't want to make something that would just benefit students. So we had the idea to make our app give back by adding a charity element; when students pay to stream lectures, the money goes to a charity of the lecture uploader's choice. And that's where the altru*istic* element of Lectur*istic* came into play!

What it does

Lecturistic uses your calendar to record lectures for you - preventing you from constantly having to start and stop recording on your own, which would be an annoyance and a deterrent for users. As a result, our app's ease of use allows for a broad network of users, thus creating a diverse collection of available lecture recordings from a variety of classes, ensuring that no matter what class you're in, someone will have uploaded a recording of it.

To begin, the user logs in and uploads their .ics calendar file to a website. From there, the app now knows when your classes are, and will start and stop recording when your classes begin and end! Once a recording is finished, the file is uploaded for your peers to purchase and stream, and deleted from local file storage to ensure that your phone isn't being overrun with lecture recording files.

How we built it

We split into two main teams when building our app. One team handled the Ruby/web portal side of development, and the other team handled the development of the Android app. Within those sub teams, the Ruby team had to handle the parsing and uploading of the .ics file data for each respective user. The Android team mainly split up to tackle the tasks of learning about how to run apps in the background of Android/how to schedule app events by time, as well as how to handle the recording and uploading of files to Azure.

Challenges we ran into

There were way more challenges we ran into this hackathon than we anticipated there would be. First off, the Ruby team ran into trouble parsing the .ics file when the Ruby gem for parsing .ics files wouldn't work. Next, our Android team had difficulty at first trying to upload our recorded audio file to Amazon S3. The SDK we had to use had a deprecated method that every single piece of documentation used, and despite a plethora of Googling, could not figure out what to do. This prompted a switch from AWS S3 to Azure, which turned out to be much easier to use with our configuration. The Android team also had quite a bit of trouble figuring out how to schedule app events, and spent quite a large chunk of time doing so.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In the end, we were able to create an app that functions with almost all the same behavior we set out to make. We overcame issues with file parsing, S3, and did our best to pull everything together.

What we learned

We learned that sometimes things don't always go quite as smoothly as anticipated, but the best thing to do is to roll with the punches and keep on trying your hardest to make things work!