Inspiration
As university students who have had both our freshman and sophomore years online, we have experienced many online learning tools as well as different forms of online teaching. We each come from different schools (UWaterloo, YorkU, CarletonU, BrockU, WLU) and conclude that online learning has been very difficult based on our personal experiences; and that the optimal way to learn and teach is that of the traditional classroom. To help alleviate this issue for both us and hopefully more people, we wish to bring about an easy-to-use and minimalistic tool that can connect students with students and teachers with students. A digital whiteboard will allow for students, especially those in STEM related fields to better visualize and understand problem solutions and solving processes.
What it does
Digital whiteboard that can be edited by various users on multiple devices. We will require the usage of a web service that connects to a server in order for numerous users to edit on the same whiteboard interface.
How we built it
Using fundamental design processes, we analyzed the project into various steps, where we were able to efficiently design and implement features for our already well-thought-out idea.
Challenges we ran into
It was challenging to link a server to the whiteboard site. We had to allocate more time on the debugging and creation of the server connection than all the other features. We overcame this issue by having a member specifically work on that section while the rest of the team focused on improving and developing other existing or in-progress features.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Since this was our first hackathon experience, we are grateful for the rich learning experiences we had and hope to be able to implement these ideas we grasped in the future as well. Being able to work together as a team and come up with an idea such that we were able to realize that concept is arguably a challenging task itself, on top of that, we were to develop a project that was also beneficial to humanity/society; thus, we are very proud of the fact that we completed our idea and was able to get it running without flaws.
What we learned
In concluding our experiences from this project, we were able to learn 4 critical concepts: (1) the importance of design processes, (2) the value of time management, (3) the various usages of CSS in web development, and (4) the understanding of HTML structural formatting.The fundamental ideas of design processes were seen to be really important as it helped us in creating a guide for the completion of the project (i.e. order of feature creation, formulation of feature concepts, etc.) Then, the value of time management was also an important factor we understood as this was our first hackathon; having to brainstorm and create an idea within 36 hours was an exciting and stressful experience. In addition, we were all able to further improve our understanding of HTML and CSS concepts which of course is a beneficial result.
What's next for WhiteBoard.io
If we were provided the funding, we hope to be able to implement this concept onto a larger platform whereby more people will be able to access and use the product. This will hopefully allow for teachers and students likewise to communicate more efficiently.
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