Discuss.io

Project Tracks

https://unitech.6ix-xiv.repl.co/index.php

Best Overall Best Beginner Hack (as Sohaila and Cohen are in high school) The UofT Engineering Sponsor Prize (As our hack is focused on making education in the classroom more inclusive)

Elevator Pitch

At Discuss.io, we believe that every student deserves a chance to participate in class discussions, regardless of their abilities or learning styles. That's why we've developed a cutting-edge web application that helps students engage more effectively in virtual settings and feel more connected to their peers and teachers.

With Discuss.io, students can ask and answer questions, upvote or downvote their classmates' contributions, and view real-time visualizations of the discussion. The platform also includes features such as the ability to take notes, bookmark important moments, and chat with other students. What sets us apart, however, is our commitment to inclusiveness. We've added features like text-to-speech and closed captioning to help students with different abilities and learning styles participate in the discussion, and we plan to continue expanding our offerings to ensure that every student has a chance to be heard.

But Discuss.io isn't just about inclusiveness - it's also about creating a more engaging and interactive learning experience for all students. By using our platform, teachers can help students feel more connected to the classroom community, while also promoting critical thinking and active learning. And because Discuss.io is built on React, Redux, and Firebase, it's both scalable and secure, making it an ideal solution for schools and universities of all sizes.

So if you're looking for a powerful and innovative solution for promoting inclusiveness and engagement in virtual classrooms, look no further than Discuss.io. With our platform, you can help every student feel like they're a part of the conversation, no matter where they are or what their abilities may be.

Inspiration

As classrooms increasingly move online, it can be difficult for all students to actively participate in class discussions. We were inspired to create a tool that helps students of all backgrounds engage more effectively in virtual settings and feel more connected to their peers and teachers. In particular, a fear of bias or saying the wrong thing can stifle even the brightest and most intelligent voices, and we wanted to put an end to it.

What it does

Our web application, called "Discuss.io," enables students to ask and answer questions, upvote or downvote their classmates' contributions, and view real-time visualizations of the discussion. The platform also includes features such as the ability to take notes, bookmark important moments, and chat with other students. To ensure inclusiveness, we've added features like text-to-speech and closed captioning to help students with different abilities and learning styles participate in the discussion.

How we built it

We used React, Next, MongoDB, Tailwind, Bootstrap, HTML, CSS, JS, Figma, and many more languages and frameworks to build our web application. We started by creating wireframes and user flows to guide our design process, then worked on building out the core functionality of the app. We also spent time refining the UI/UX to ensure a seamless and intuitive experience for users, with special attention given to accessibility.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was figuring out how to make the platform accessible to students with different abilities and learning styles. Conforming to accessibility guidelines was not as intuitive as we might have thought. Furthermore, since we have minimal experience with serverless architectures, developing systems using models like pub/sub to update the discussion contents in real time for both students and teachers was difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the fact that we were able to create a functional and user-friendly application in just a short amount of time while also making it inclusive for all students. We also feel good about the fact that we were able to incorporate a lot of useful features into the platform without sacrificing simplicity or ease of use.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned a lot about the importance of inclusiveness in education technology. We also gained a better understanding of how to make web applications accessible to all users, regardless of their abilities or learning styles. We learned about industry-standard frameworks and softwares as well, and had many firsts (i.e. using React / Next, MongoDB, and the vast majority of the frameworks we used in our project are tools that we used for the very first time to achieve a technical task).

What's next for Discuss.io

In the future, we hope to continue developing Discuss.io by adding more features that promote inclusiveness, such as translation services and support for different types of assistive technology. We also plan to conduct user testing and gather feedback from students and teachers from a wide range of backgrounds in order to refine the application and ensure that it is as inclusive as possible.