TestEasy | Devpost

Inspiration

Amidst online learning, students are faced with a diverse amount of test formats. Professors require a PDF version of their paper exams, but there are a vast amount of students who do not have access to a printer, and must go through a tedious process to create the desired submittable PDF.

In fact, not every single student can afford to buy their own printers or scanners. As students, some of us have faced this problem ourselves and we understand the pain of not having access to a printer. Some people will rely on their public libraries, school libraries and other means to find a way to access a computer. However, this strategy is no longer feasible and applicable for these students. Due to this pandemic, most students are obliged to stay at home unless it is necessary to leave their safe haven.

Questions we considered:

What would happen to students who do not have access to printers or scanners during this quarantine period?

How can students conveniently merge their files to hand it in to their instructors?

Why are we going to let these students lose their opportunity to educate themselves if we know that we should do something about this problem?

Solution

Students won’t have to use multiple platforms to upload their work anymore!

TestEasy is a centralizing program that students can use to upload their work and answers. Students can merge the multiple files that they have uploaded onto the website. Each file uploaded represents one answer to the question.

This web app would also help reduce paper waste and allow students to work on their assignments without the use of a printer.

Aside from that, TestEasy is an accessible and convenient web app that can be used on the web browser of your device.

How We built it

In the beginning, we brainstormed for the functionality of the web app. We also created a name for the website and we designed the website’s logo. We prototyped the web app using Adobe XD as a group.
After planning out the prototype, we started coding the frontend of the website using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Then, we hosted our Github repository to a customized domain address called http://testeasy.tech/
Node.js was also used for the frontend and the backend of the website. After finishing the backend, we connected the frontend to the backend.

Challenges we ran into

In every path, there are obstacles to be encountered. Our team faced difficulties in communicating with each other due to time zone differences.

We’re from Canada and the United States. With the time zone difference, some of us had to compromise by sacrificing our sleeping schedules.

In addition, sometimes the internet connection sucks. It’s difficult to be working on a project during a call with a bad internet connection.

We were pretty much noobs in web development. JavaScript was quite challenging to learn firsthand. So then, we asked for help from a mentor who helped and guided us through JavaScript.

During the beginning of a hackathon, we had a different solution and problem that we wanted to tackle. Due to the time constraint and extensive technical complexity, we realized that our first idea would approximately take about one week to be finished. As a result, we had to pick a more realistic project after 6 hours of when the hackathon begins.

We’ve implemented a dynamic website on our local host, however we did not have enough time due to the time constraint. Therefore, we did not have any more time to create a new website.

However, we did not want time zone differences, sleep deprivation, bad internet connection and other setbacks to hold us back from participating at TO Hacks 2020.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

One of the accomplishments that we are proud of is our a domain.com Flexibility → pivoted and changed our project Website → I learned node.js Website looks presentable