Project Stress Test

Utilizing the Perceived Stress Scale, we created a website that professors can use to measure the stress levels of their students, receive feedback on their teaching/course, and adjust accordingly.

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Inspiration

As everyone in our group is a non-CS major, we decided to work on a topic that overlaps both with CS and the other fields that we're interested in, in this case psychology and mental health, and how that impacts academic success. Our inspiration for this project was due to the collective stress that we've noticed on Davis campus. It feels like there's a disconnect between the professors and students at times and it can be difficult to express concerns to the professor. We wanted to create an effective way for professors to quantify the stress that their students are under, so that they can appropriately adjust their teaching methods/workloads. This is a web app that we feel is beneficial for both professor and student.

What it does

Our web app provides a code to the professor that they can in turn provide to their classes. The students in these classes can in turn use this code to access the survey that utilizes the Perceived Stress Scale, a psychological assessment of stress. After answering these questions, the student can give feedback to the professor anonymously and receive their score. This information is then saved into a database for students in this class and then processed. By inputting the code into the analytics section of our web app, professors can see the average stress levels of their students and other graphs comparing stress levels among class year.

How we built it

We built our project using Python Flask, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS for developing the web app and MongoDB for our database. We used Matplotlib for creating graphs and used ChatGPT to analyze the data for our analytics section.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of trouble in the beginning because it was our first time working with Flask, JSON, databases, and pandas. Working together we were able to integrate these technologies into our project. In addition, towards the end of our project we ran into issues with integrating LLMs into our feedback and drawing a histogram from the data we receive and developing special codes for each form.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All in all, we're really proud of our web app. This was our first big project of this scale that incorporates front end, back end, and databases and we feel like we were able to put something together that we're happy with.

What we learned

We learned a lot about web design and working with databases. All of us were more comfortable with just backend development but from this project we were able to learn so much more and created new found interest and passion for full stack development and web design.

What's next for Project Stress Test

We'd also like to create an option for professors to create more class specific questions in addition to the questions that we've already provided. This would allow for professors to create more personalized surveys which we think would be very useful.

References

Cohen, Sheldon, et al. “A Global Measure of Perceived Stress.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, vol. 24, no. 4, 1983, pp. 385–96. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2136404. Accessed 28 Apr. 2024.

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