What is better-pizza?
better-pizza is like Piazza but done differently. The goal is to create an environment that feels less bootstrap boilerplate and more modern. Using cool text effects and nice things such as:
- markdown
- katex
- highlight.js
We aim to deliver a better educational forum that will have faster loading math, sexy and customizable code blocks, and modern formatting.
Motivation
The motivation here is that Piazza is utilized by many math and computer science classes. However on Piazza, it is evident that the code blocks are ugly and that math solutions load very slowly with mathjax.
Another key issue is the redundancy in posts. Over many years of using Piazza, it's clear that students want answers quickly but don't bother searching. This wastes a lot of tutor and teaching assistant resources to answer or link the appropriate answer to a question that has already been asked before. Changing how users post questions will clearly open up the classroom resources and allow for efficiency.
Finding the class resources and syllabus is also a hassle. Obviously, every class has a syllabus. It's location should be evident, and easily accessible for students instead of being hidden behind a wall of links.
There are more issues to solve but those are just from the top of my head.
Progress Screenshots
Login and landing page with react
Contributing
Currently you need a sceret key for django in a secretkey file and your mysql credentials in dbcred.json. And put it in the root directory.