SyncEd | Devpost

Front Page Interface
Log In Interface
Teacher Home Page Interface
Parent Home Page Interface

Inspiration

Elementary education is crucial for a child’s learning and development. We’ve recently seen parents concerned that they’re not involved or don't know their child’s learning process. We decided that to bridge the gap between parents and teachers, we would need to build a platform where teachers can update parents on their child’s progress at school and parents can easily contact their child’s teachers.

What it does

SyncEd is an application that will allow easy communication between parents and teachers. Teachers and parents will log on with the app taking them to their designated window depending on their role. A teacher will have more control over what is displayed in the child’s progress. There will be an attendance section to mark which students are present, which will be updated live on the parent’s end of the app. The teacher will also be able to display the day plans and change them anytime they want. This will instantly change it on the parent's screens to see what their child’s school day would be like. Additionally, SyncEd allows teachers to post end-of-the-day announcements to tell parents how their child did in class. On the parent’s window, they can view if their child is present, and what their child will be doing for the day, and they can reply to the teacher’s end-of-day message, which will then be displayed on the teacher’s window. Moreover, our prototype accounts for errors during client usage. For example, when the user inputs the wrong login credentials, they receive an error message requiring them to re-login.

How we built it

Using JavaFX and Scene Builder, we worked on the front-end development of SyncEd. Scene Builder allowed us to efficiently create the front page, login page, and both the parent’s and teacher’s interfaces in a short amount of time. We used Java for the back-end development, and this included what scene would pop up after a user logs in, how the messages were sent between teachers and parents, and how the day plans were displayed.

Challenges we ran into

One of the first challenges we ran into was that a few members of the team were having trouble running Scene Builder. It took us a while to figure out that we needed to manually change the platform in order to run JavaFX, but we had no issues with the environment afterwards. When coding for the messages to be sent between scenes, we came into a challenge where the file being read was being formatted differently. After trial and error, we realized we would need an additional method so that the format remains the same when being read and written.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team had a schedule we decided to follow in order to organize our tasks and make sure we were completing the project on time. While coding, we realized we were perfectly on time and weren’t in a rush to complete the project. This was a factor we were worried about but now looking back, it’s an accomplishment.

What we learned

Coding-wise, we learned how to send messages/data between different scenes so that both parties will see live updates. Project-wise, we learned that we should test out the IDEs as soon as possible so that we don’t waste time just on that.

What's next for SyncEd

For future improvements of SyncEd, we would add more security within the app ensuring personal information is kept safe. We would also like to add functionality to the app so that parents and teachers can customize their app.