Time Chaser

A platform that advocates for transparency and healthier work-life balance between schools and teachers.

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💡 Inspiration 💡

We believe that teachers are the pillars of our society and pave the way for the next generation to thrive and grow. Even though they play such a huge role in the development of a successful community, they are often overworked, underpaid, and treated unfairly. This led us to address the issue of exploited teachers and raise awareness of this global problem.

References:

https://www.rappler.com/nation/overworked-teachers-among-causes-philippines-high-learning-poverty-rate/
https://www.ei-ie.org/en/item/25366:new-global-report-points-to-overworked-underpaid-and-undervalued-teaching-profession

⚙️ What it does ⚙️

Time Chase is a QR code-based time tracking website that keeps track of your own schedule and advocates for a healthier work-life balance for teachers.

We use QR codes to verify the time-ins and time-outs of our users. This is integral for us as this lets us add another layer of security to the process, promotes transparency between the school and the teacher, and makes it convenient for them to log their times. We also added a virtual map with markers with different colors that signify the average number of hours per marker with green markers being the least overworked and red markers being the most overworked academic institutions.

This data helps us arrive at conclusions on which schools have the highest density of overworked teachers and can serve as a stepping stone to better equip leaders to make more inclusive decisions.

🏗️ How we built it 🏗️

We developed the application with love using the React library for the frontend, and the Flask framework for the backend. Additionally, we used CockroachDB as our database to store information such as the logs and passphrases, Psycopg2 library as an adapter to connect to it, and Twilio to send confirmation SMS.

Time Chaser diagram

⚫ GitHub Usage ⚫

The app consists of different components that we divided among ourselves so we used four different branches to facilitate unconflicted development on each side. We also deployed our React app to GitHub Pages that you can try in the 'try it out links'.

🟣 Twilio 🟣

We used Twilio for message confirmation whenever the user logs in or out of Time Chaser. This ensures that teachers can verify whether or not they were able to log in to Time Chaser successfully and subsequently, serves as a paper trail in that regard.

🚩 Challenges we ran into

Most of our members were new to hackathons so we had to prime them on what to expect and work together closely so that there weren't any communication problems. Setting up the different environments in multiple devices with different operating systems proved to be the main challenge we encountered. This is compounded by the fact that some of us are working with Linux-flavored environments and some are using Windows. We also encountered some minor hiccups in accessing the data from the request objects but we eventually made it work and moved on from that. There were also bugs in the backend that showed early on and it took us almost a day to solve it due to communication issues, but with perseverance, we came out stronger and with better teamwork than ever.

🥇 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to integrate the usage of QR codes into the equation and it was our first time working with it so it served as a learning experience for us all. Moreover, most of the team are newbies to hackathons so it was very nice to introduce new people to this hobby and make new friends as well.

Ultimately, we are proud that we were able to create an application that raises awareness of an existing problem that plagues the teaching populace and that we were able to finish this in time for the hackathon submission.

📚 What we learned

We learned a lot in working with QR codes namely how to utilize them and how to configure them to fit in with what we need for the application. We learned how to work with people with different work habits and work styles and different schedules as we hadn’t all hadn’t known each other until that week.

⏳ What's next for Time Chaser

For the future milestones for Time Chaser, we envision it having a better UI and screen responsiveness and are hoping to add more features that would aid in the web app’s ease of use while utilizing AI/ML solutions.

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