We first had a look at the moodle eLearning system most of us already knew from their school time. By side of looking at existing solutions did we have the opportunity to get direct feedback from a teacher. Combined with our knowledge and the one from our mentor did we create the current concept.
It gives teachers the possibility to create learning materials, exercises, assignments, and whole lessons. Each student does get added to the lessons he has to attend and can see them in the intuitive timeline on his dashboard. The parents do have the possibility in the same time to watch the latest statistics about their children, to request a call/meeting with the teacher, and they are able to see what is planned next in the calendar for each child.
All the above-mentioned functionalities with the related code are MIT licensed and free to use. The goal would be to provide an open permissionless system for anyone and if possible free of charge. This project could get developed without any full time hires and could get transitioned into a real OpenSourceSoftware project with the required funding for the servers.
We mostly focused on the client-side of the project and do currently use the Google Cloud. Behind the scene are a no-sql database and a simple authentication service. The whole project is written in JavaScript to be able to run it on close to every known device. Because of the clear abstraction from the client to the backend we have. We are able to move the current existing services to self-hosted swiss servers with ease.
Techstack:
- React & Mobx
- MongoDB
- OAuth2
- JavaScript
We first have planned to set up the complete backend on our own with Go, Docker, and CockroachDB but had to stop this because of the limited time and manpower we had. We then created quickly the services we need on the Google Cloud and started to connect the backend services with the browser-based client.
We achieved in a really small amount of time a nice looking UI, working backend, and had the possibility to use some great new browser APIs. We think we can be proud of the current UX/UI and management logic we have created in such a short amount of time.
We learned this hackathon that we probably first should start with the UI of our project and stub data and to slowly integrate the backend instead of putting so many hours on the backend. Those hours are better spent on the UI/UX of our hackathon project.
- Setting up of Switzerland based servers
- Finalizing of existing features
- Asking for feedback from teachers, students, and parents.
- Creating of the demo v0.1
- Defining of the final concept for 1.0 and implementing it.
- Advertise it for schools and teachers.
In the project directory, you can run:
Runs the app in the development mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.
The page will reload if you make edits.
You will also see any lint errors in the console.
Launches the test runner in the interactive watch mode.
See the section about running tests for more information.
Builds the app for production to the build folder.
It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance.
The build is minified and the filenames include the hashes.
Your app is ready to be deployed!
See the section about deployment for more information.
Note: this is a one-way operation. Once you eject, you can’t go back!
If you aren’t satisfied with the build tool and configuration choices, you can eject at any time. This command will remove the single build dependency from your project.
Instead, it will copy all the configuration files and the transitive dependencies (webpack, Babel, ESLint, etc) right into your project so you have full control over them. All of the commands except eject will still work, but they will point to the copied scripts so you can tweak them. At this point you’re on your own.
You don’t have to ever use eject. The curated feature set is suitable for small and middle deployments, and you shouldn’t feel obligated to use this feature. However we understand that this tool wouldn’t be useful if you couldn’t customize it when you are ready for it.
You can learn more in the Create React App documentation.
To learn React, check out the React documentation.
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