Ako Chrome Extension

Bringing motivation + resource curation to learning by letting you save all online learning resources under learning Playlists by topic, track your progress, and invite friends to view each Playlist.

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Inspiration

We both met virtually a few months ago and bonded over the fact that we had a shopping list of things we wanted to teach ourselves, but were having trouble staying motivated and organizing resources to identify where to start. We came up with the idea for this chrome extension (!Ako = "learning" in Maori!) because we wanted a simple tool that could help us with these problems, and bring us and others on the path of meeting learning goals.

What it does

Shows a list of saved Learning Playlists, allows user to save a tab into a playlist, save all current tabs in the window as a new playlist, create a new playlist with a name input, and open a learning playlist as a new window.

How we built it

After creating a basic Figma mockup, we designed and set up a Google Cloud SQL database, then separately worked on the frontend and backend. On the backend, we created a Flask app to act as an intermediary between the extension and the database, and on the frontend we used HTML, JS, and CSS to build out the main functionality (as well as some JQuery).

Challenges we ran into

Neither of us had extensive experiences with databases or frontend before, so we found this weekend to be challenging overall as we learned what we needed to build what we had in our minds. In particular, we were having trouble connecting the Flask app to the SQL server, and debugging JavaScript functions for the frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building the SQL database on Google Cloud, establishing a secure connection between the server and the Flask app, building a functional chrome extension for the first time!

What we learned

We learned how to design and connect a SQL database! Even though we're still working on functions in the frontend, that was a great learning curve. We were also beginners to backend web dev, so we learned a great deal about effectively planning UI, scaffolding a chrome extension correctly, encrypting the right information, and structuring files in the most efficient way.

What's next for Ako Chrome Extension

We're planning on building this out into a more interactive and social-based learning chrome extension, implementing OAuth to allow users to have their own logins and profiles, then integrating things like Slack automatic messaging to let people update communities about their learning progress.

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