Rewind.app

Rewind.app

Inspiration

Education is vital to uplifting disadvantaged communities, yet many students still struggle to keep up—even with access to online lectures. That’s why we created Rewind.app: a tool designed to support students, especially those with learning disabilities, by making it easier to catch up and stay engaged with their lectures. It not only helps people with disabilities but also accelerates for those who are already doing well in their courses.

What it does

Rewind.app offers a real-time rewind feature for any online lecture, allowing students to revisit critical moments instantly to reinforce learning. With powered highlights and a flagging tool, students can mark important points to review later. Rewind.app also allows users to download entire lecture sessions and switch effortlessly between live and replay modes, offering a flexible, immersive learning experience that adapts to each student's pace and needs.

How we built it

Leveraged React.js to build the core framework for our web app, enabling the video rewind service.
Implemented an efficient buffer with memory allocation to optimize performance.
Utilized a combination of CSS and React.js to seamlessly integrate all essential features and functionalities of the web app.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was recording audio effectively. On macOS, the absence of a volume mixer caused issues, as both the web app and Zoom audio were captured simultaneously by WebRTC when recording system audio.
Another challenge was deciding between using the Zoom API or manually recording online lectures. Ultimately, we found that the Zoom API was too complex and time-consuming, given the 24-hour constraint.
Finally, implementing all the small details proved to be a significant time sink, requiring considerable effort to fine-tune every aspect of the system.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We can create what many platforms do not have, which is a real-time replay future.
We can concatenate videos seamlessly.
We are most proud of our platform, which enables students taking online lecture classes to use another tool to accelerate learning.

What we learned

We learned that implementing real-time video services is both complex and memory-intensive. There's a reason many platforms don't offer real-time playback despite its importance for student learning. Through this project, we discovered how to leverage WebRTC to its full potential for video recording.
We learned that we faced significant challenges in recording and seamlessly concatenating videos, which required thoughtful memory management techniques. Applying our class theory to memory optimization, we created a buffer that allowed the video stream to flow smoothly.
Additionally, we tackled the complexities of downloading, flagging, and implementing live features—tasks that proved far more complicated than initially anticipated.

What's next for Rewind.app

Currently, Rewind.app is a web app. We plan to expand into creating apps for smart devices such as tablets and phones to empower people who cannot afford a laptop or computer.

Auto generates flagging instead of students manually picking crucial information.
Cloud-based video storage is needed instead of a local one to ensure performance peaks even when the lecture video gets long with a content library.
Integration with the current school platform to ensure the Rewind.app will be used.
AI generates a comprehensive summary and a study list with practice exercises, ensuring students stay on track and never fall behind.