Accelerate

Landing Page
Student Dashboard

Inspiration

Fueled by our enthusiasm for Roblox and cars, we developed Accelerate to transform driver's education by emphasizing interactive, hands-on learning.

What it does

Accelerate revolutionizes driver's education by blending immersive learning with gaming. Through our platform, students engage with instructional materials and then practice driving in a Roblox simulation, while instructors may remotely monitor and assess skills in real-time. Our curriculum offers a broad range of modules, each exploring a unique driving topic through text, video, and interactive Roblox simulations.

How we built it

We used React for our frontend. React proved to be the logical choice for us due to its comprehensive library support and the effectiveness of its state-based components in crafting a seamless and integrated user experience.
We implemented Propel-Auth in conjunction with the Roblox OAuth 2.0 API for authentication, creating a secure and efficient login workflow. This integration facilitates users in connecting their Roblox accounts, enhancing and streamlining the educational experience.
For data storage, we utilized Firebase Realtime Database (RTDB), which houses both our educational modules and user profiles. This choice enabled real-time synchronization and instant access to data, ensuring a dynamic and responsive user experience.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered a technical challenge when working to integrate Roblox with our application, as our method of storing user data, a Firebase RTDB, is not natively supported by the Roblox platform. To address this, we used Robase, a library designed to access a Firebase RTDB directly from Roblox. However, the absence of documentation tailored to our specific use case complicated our efforts to query the database, forcing us to make modifications to our database schema.
This hackathon was a first-time experience for three out of our four members, with some of our members not having prior React experience either. Collaboration and communication were key to ensuring tasks were completed without any of our members feeling overwhelmed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of finding ways to deliver educational content in a novel way, allowing students to better understand and interact with material previously taught in a text-based format.
We are also proud of how much we have learned about the application design process. Creating Accelerate required us to extensively plan out its features to avoid facing challenges in implementation.

What we learned

Our journey with Accelerate deepened our understanding of technologies such as React, routing, NoSQL databases, cloud engineering, and Roblox experiences, enriching our technical skillset.
As first-timers in this hackathon, we embraced the opportunity for growth and learning, gaining invaluable insights and experience that will undoubtedly shape our future endeavors.

What's next for Accelerate

As we seek to further enrich the driver's education process, we look to add features that make the learning process more seamless and immersive, which include:

Expanding our module library to cover a broader spectrum of topics.
Introducing live chat functionality, enabling direct communication between students and instructors for real-time guidance and support.
Building out the Roblox experience so that it becomes a realistic large-scale open-world driving simulator.