Classii

What it does

Classii is a web extension designed to reduce the 96% average dropout rates of online courses by acting as a community, accountability tracker and organizational system for young women taking courses in STEM fields.

Inspiration

Young women in STEM often do not pursue STEM later in life!

Online courses have become a new means for people to explore their own interests and motivate them to pursue careers of choice.

However many people find it difficult to stay motivated and to complete them.

What studies show...

How we built it

With a recipe for success...

Lofi wireframes on paper → Prototyping in Figma → HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build the MVP web extension!

Challenges we ran into

Finishing on time:

There were a lot of features and functionality we hoped to include but didn't get a chance to.

Debugging:

We ran into a handful of bugs that took a lot of time to figure out, mainly because we weren't familiar with debugging in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Github:

Much of our team wasn't familiar with using Github, so ran into issues with checking out and merging branches.

Learning curve:

Most of us either were either new to web development or hadn't done it in a while, so we spent a good chunk of time reviewing and learning concepts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

How well put together the extension came to be in such a short period of time!
Coming up with a simple solution to a far-reaching problem.
Going from idea → prototype → MVP in a weekend.

What we learned

As a beginner-intermediate level team, the languages we used in this hackathon were relatively new to us - and for two of us, this was our first substantial project using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. As a result, these past 36 hours involved a lot of watching videos, reading documentation and reaching out to mentors to explain concepts. It was also a couple of our first times using GitHub in a team setting, and this hackathon we became familiar with concepts like checking out and merging branches.

What's next for Classii

We plan to continue working on Classii post-hack and publish a finished version to the Chrome Web Store later this week! Struggling to finish online courses is a problem a few of us on the team face, and we’ll be using Classii down the road to keep us on track and motivated.