During the Covid pandemic, people switched everything to online including their education, jobs, etc. In the field of education, teachers find it difficult to manage the teaching process online, handling their live online classes, timely evaluation and feedback, peer to peer interaction, and so much more. Some teachers are also learning to reach better standards. So we have to consider the betterment of students also. As students, there are problems faced by them including not being able to -give proper feedback, find their immediate pending assignment, on-time doubt clearance and much more. This all made us inspire and build something that would help our dear teachers as well as students.
‘Edhack’ is a digital application that is analogous to our classrooms. The app provides a platform for educational institutions to offer their services to the students even during the pandemic. The teachers and students are facilitated with calendars(synced with their emails), reminders, edhack meets(online class), notes, all of which would be stored in the cloud. The app allows you to swap your designation from teacher to student, it also has the amazing feature of using AI to evaluate the answer sheets posted onto the respective classes and also provides a detailed sheet of their scores. It even has an option to list the students as anonymous in the ‘Doubt Corner’ so that they would not have to be shy away from asking a doubt and the teachers can give points to the students who could solve their peer’s doubts (there wouldn't be a leader board and every student would be able to see only their points and even the teacher cannot see the individual’s points) The ‘We need a break’ feature has been incorporated into the edhack meet which would set off an alarm on the teacher’s screen when more than 25% of the class press the feature within 2 minutes. In the edhack meet, messages in the chatbox would be visible even while presenting the screen.
First, through various brainstorming and online meetings we gave our idea a basic structure. Then we divided the work among each other, some dealt with the designing part of the app, some writing the contents. We made a prototype of the app using software called Figma and we all worked on it and made necessary changes. We used Google Meet for carrying out brainstorming meetings. We incorporated AI/ Machine Learning to help answer sheet evaluation for teachers. This was all made possible with the help of constant communication.
Challenges we ran into As we were beginners, it did consume a whole lot of time to learn the basics of app development using flutter. Also, AI and ML were completely new for us.
We gained considerable knowledge of app development using flutter in such a short span of time. Some of our teammates gained knowledge on AI/ML for incorporating some extra features. Also, for a few of our teammates, this was their first hackathon and the experience was great.
The things we learnt were innumerable. We never thought that we could learn in such a short time. Firstly, we learnt the basics of app development using flutter and got to work on this project using this technology. Along with that, during the period we were able to use AI/ML. The experience of working remotely as a team was fascinating and gave a lot of insights.
We want to incorporate regional languages in our app and would like to make ‘edhack’ the default online classroom.