EUREKA

• 

  main interface

Inspiration

Learning isn't a passive process by any means. Our schools, whether a kindergarten or a four year institution, try their best to provide an environment that fosters a deep love for subject matter, educate students about various matters of the world, and foster a sense of community amongst the teachers, students, and parents.

And yet, schools are simply the foundation of this process. We consistently find that the deepest learning experiences we have are built in our day to day encounters by interacting with the world around us. Our connections with the other people around us, as we interact and engage with them in dialogue, serve as an inspiration for creative ideas and connections between concepts that strengthen our understanding of just about everything.

Thus, I chose to build an application that would serve one particular purpose: to meet students where they are (primarily the web) and enhance their learning experiences in collaborative environments.

What it does

In that sense, I created a socket-based web environment through which a group of students could discuss problems, highlight insights from friends that help them to understand concepts more thoroughly, and collaboratively come up with unified solutions. The app also aims to enhance the experience by pulling out key concepts from the conversation and question and allowing them to be explored further through familiar online resources.

How I built it

Straight up web development. Thought through the problem space, then designed the interface, then learned Socket.io, then built out the interface, then integrated the key interactions with Socket.io. And other things. Pretty straightforward.

Challenges I ran into

Learning Socket.io was kind of a pain at first, but quickly became comfortable. Also, asynchronous Javascript was an hour of my time. Gone.

The primary constraint was time, as I was working by myself and often had to take breaks because of who I am as a person.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I managed to go through all the steps of the process -- I made giant mental maps, interviewed people, designed wireframes, built out a frontend and backend, and more -- all by myself (with the help of some awesome mentors, of course).

What I learned

Even though I loved going through this process alone, I definitely know this could have been better with a few people to help out. I'm definitely not arriving late to a hackathon next time.

It's also interesting to consider the tradeoffs between

What's next for EUREKA

The data that you can get from creating a conversational interface for educational purposes could be phenomenal. If a teacher tracks this information within the community of their students, they could understand where they may need to focus their efforts or potentially even find new ways of teaching the material. Learning is an inherently personal process, and with most curricula not having evolved much (in methodology) over the past 100 years, there's a lot of potential benefit here.

Additionally, something like this can easily be adapted into a browser extension to gather more information and relevant resources from a student's browsing activity, AND it can be integrated into existing educational platforms.

Built With

• blood-sweat-and-tears
• css3
• html5
• javascript
• node.js