This is a hackathon aimed at addressing issues that arise in education or business or health or other areas , we were given some options and 2 days to get everything ready to go.
1)Poor access to tech education for disabled learners.
2)How do you know what you don't know if self educating.
3)Hard to accomodate both students who are struggling and excelling in a classroom.
The Virtual Classroom Room is an application designed to help create a real life scenario for disabled or affected people to be able to interact and learn in a constructive environment. The idea behind this stems from the issue of helping people who are unable to participate in normal learning environments and creating a world where they are able to access classes based on different topics, teachers, scenarios to provide them an authentic VR learning experience where they are able to interact in real time with other students, courses and information.
There were a number of steps that we went through when determining our end concept for this project, the first being deciding what question we would address for this. To begin with, as a team we worked together to brainstorm ideas coming up with a minimum of 1 idea per question, the list of ideas we had are below:
- Accomodating both students who are struggling and excelling in a classroom.
- Seat Assignment App - The idea behind this was to come up with a way to assign a student his chair in the classroom based on a number of factors including their ability, their suitability and basic requirements.
- How do you know what you don't know if self educating.
- VR Social App - Where you can connect with other people in your location who are self-learning the same languages or topic. You could organise meet ups or access a virtual class room which would allow you to discuss, trade and develop your education using informal self-learning channels. It would use a tiered structure where people who are further along are required to teach and help those below them in the learning process.
- VR Internship Simulator - Experience a set of simulations of what it's like to be working in a job as an x developer at x company.
- Online Course - set deadlines to complete content eg for each week.
3.Poor access to tech education for disabled learners
- Virtual Classroom App - An app for those who are unable to leave their house or hospital. This would give people opportunities to upgrade their skills
- Virtual Guide Dog - An app for the visually disabled - A virtual guide dog which helps you teach and navigate topics in a special way that addresses their needs.
- Internship Opportunities for disabled tech students - An app that connects people studying in the tech sector to have access to internship opportunities.
We ended up choosing poor access as this was one which had a higher degree of difficulty and it's potential to be used in various types of scenarios with the aim of providing education to lots of niche audiences who are unable to access education at the moment. We envision that an application like this would be a fully accredited course which could then be heavily supported by government programs giving disability students better accessibility and funds for using a program such as this. The idea behind this would be also to extend this past just disability students and extending it to students of all types who either have non-physical disabilities or students who are looking for alternative learning experiences. The user stories that we developed for this idea were boiled down to very basic components we knew we would need to provide as an MVP product. The ability to build out functionality which would fall outside the MVP product are endless and opens up the ability for users to be able to access the wider tech community through one simple medium.
- NodeJS
- MongoDB
- ExpressJS
- React
There were a few different factors that we needed to take into account when scoping out this idea, especially the fact that none of us were well familiar with the capability of building a fully fledged Virtual Class Management Portal. The language is fairly intuitive but one of the things we noticed pretty quickly is that there are very limited tutorials and documentation to provide guidance. As we were using a fairly basic structure for our application we were able to allocate some resources to purely developing the scenarios which gave them time to understand and play around with the framework to come up with an MVP Solution. Using real life imagery and resources from various resources, we were able to create a two step process for the users, the first being that they could land on a site and choose the topic/class that they were looking to join and the second being the actual VR classroom. The virtual classroom incorporates various tools such as:
- Internship Portal : To help the students get acquainted with various opportunities providing them real world scenarios to implement and upgrade their skills.
- Course Portal : Involves the courses which the users have enrolled in from various platforms such as Coursera,Udemy,CodingBlocks,etc.
- Refreshments : Keeping the users in touch with the current news happening in various tags can serve as a refreshment for the stressful activities done by the users.
The development of this concept comes with the ability for significant growth as accessibility and funding become more available. Currently as our MVP product stands the application can accomodate Users need to be able to access an online classroom, a forum to access and share materials, and a way for them to interact with the wider tech community. If this product were to extend to the next stage then we would look at including other user stories such as:
- Implementing better accessibility practices into our application.
- Complete development of the individual experience including any additional functionality our research would show they require.
- Providing special development areas in the form of skill development courses as well as internships where they can interact and share experiences like community areas and study rooms.
- Ability to put up and share code snippets/resources directly in the virtual space, we would like to make this as visually compelling as possible.
- Siddharth Rai(team lead,backend and cloud solutions specialist)
- Roshan Jha(frontend developer)
1)You can obtain the repository from Github. 2)Navigate to the client folder . Open the Command Prompt. Type the command "npm install".This will install all the packages required for running the frontend.Type the command "npm start" which will start the frontend and you will get a message showing that the frontend server has started. 3)Go back to the main folder.Navigate to the server folder.Type the command "npm install".This will install all the packages required for running the backend.Type the command "node app.js" which will start the backend and you will get a message showing that the backend server has started.
Screenshots folder contains all the screenshots related to the project.