Inspiration
As current first-year students ourselves, our first thought was about education, and how that can perpetuate the existing inequalities and barriers to access technology for such users. For the past 24 hours, we have been working on a solution that can address this problem in a manner that is feasible, sustainable and innovative.
What it does
Users are first greeted by a landing page in which they scroll through or access by clicking the navigation bar to get to their destination. Currently, we have 3 services available -- signing up as a student, signing up as a tutor, and connecting with other students with similar interests. Our platform will then automatically match tutors and students if they are available at the same time and list the same subject on their information. However, we recognize that naturally, through a free service like this, the demand of students will far outweigh the supply of tutors. This is where Sphere differs from other platforms, and where Co-Here comes in: Using Co-Here’s natural language processing capabilities, The Cohere API uses semantics search to connect students with similar interests and pair them with students.
How we built it
Sphere uses a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build the front end, and MySQL, Python, Flask and the Co-Here API to build the back-end. We use Flask to connect both ends, get user data, and then store it in a MySQL database. Additionally, we use Co-Here’s semantic search API to connect students to other students with similar needs and interests based on their own description.
Challenges we ran into
It was really hard patching up the whole project in less than 24 hours, especially with just a team of two first-years, but we are really proud of the results of our hard work, and we hope you like it too!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of successfully using API's like Cohere and Flask, since this is the first time we have come across these technologies. We also integrated a lot of our course learning into this project both from university and high school, like mysql and python connectivity, javascript, and inheritance in python.
What we learned
We learned a lot about new frameworks like flask, json, mysql and cohere. We also helped each other with frontend and backend, so we learned from each other too!
What's next for Sphere
In the future, we plan to expand this platform by transforming it into a social media platform where students can have profiles about their academic needs, and, using Co-Here’s natural language processing capabilities, connect them based on similarities so they can work together to solve problems.
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