Inspiration
While there are a few apps to aid K-12 teachers with assigning news articles, they primarily focus on written responses or auto-graded multiple choice quizzes that are seen only by a student's teacher. Meanwhile, students are engaging with the latest TikTok sensation across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. We wanted to combine the dynamic interaction and gamification of social media with the need to develop critical literacy and new-reading habits.
What it does
Newsplosion integrates real-world news articles, integral critical thinking skills, and social media into one lightweight K-12 app. In each session, students see a menu of recent news articles retrieved from News API. They can click into a news article, read it in-app, and then create a splode (post) sharing their thoughts in under 500 characters. Afterward, students can reply, upvote, and react to their classmates' splodes.
How we built it
For the design, we used multiple wireframes to develop an idea of the UI flow from view to view. We used these wireframes and flowcharts to develop our components in React. We developed schema that we would use to store in a MongoDB database, as well as brainstormed options for user creation and authentication.
Challenges we ran into
We did not find an optimal solution for a comprehensive backend. Additionally, we learned how to overcome errors and conflicts when collaborating on GitHub.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of coming up with a working prototype (with some hardcoded elements) that demonstrate the essential features of our web app. Selecting an API, developing potential plans on how to create useful calls, and developing a UI were all accomplishments we are proud of.
What we learned
Hackathons are stepping stones to learn something new. We all came into our first hackathon with varying experiences: two JHU first-years, a JHU senior, and a part-time grad student and product manager. Two of us used React for the first time, one of us brought back-end knowledge to the project, and another stepped in to explore Firebase as an alternative solution in a time-crunch.
What's next for Untitled
First, we will connect this prototype to a backend server and MongoDB cluster. Account creation authentication are stil needed. Possible features include:
- Allowing a teacher role to set the query keyword to customize the topic for the session.
- A grading system or archive for teachers to review.
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