nwHacks 2020
Inspiration
To students, notes are an academic gold standard. Many work tirelessly to create immaculate lecture transcriptions and course study guides - but not everyone writes in a style that is accessible to everyone else, making the task of sharing notes sometimes fruitless. Moreover, board notes are often messy, or unreliable. Wouldn't it be nice for a crowdsourced bank of lecture notes to be minimized to just the bare essentials? But moreover, essentials tailored to your chosen style of reading and learning?
What it does
The hope was to build a web app for students to share class notes, and be able to merge those notes into their own custom file, which would contain their favourite parts of everyone else's notes. In reality, we made an app that authenticates a user, and not much else.
How we built it
We built a MERN stack app - MongoDB, Express.js, and Node.js for the back end, while React for the front end - and powered the AI that we were able to put together using Google Cloud.
Challenges we ran into
We found user registration and authentication to be a huge hurdle to our development, stunting nearly all of our wished-for features. Moreover, the lack of a solid plan and framework made fitting the back-end and the front-end together rather difficult, as these pieces were all developed seperately
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud that we all learned a great deal about web development, front-end frameworks, databasing, and why we should use Flask. We're also incredibly proud of our designer, who put together the most impressive parts of our app.