swatishree-mahapatra / guideme

An Ed-Tech project to make the best of e-learning resources more accessible

Project Name: GuideMe

Tagline: GuideMe acts as a compass in your preparation journey.

Technologies we used:

MongoDB Express React Nodejs Material UI Firebase

Inspiration:

After JEE, when we look back, we find that, had we got the right resources, at the right time and in an organized manner, we would not have had to waste time surfing through multiple platforms for the best resources and a good mentor to guide us through the journey and clear our doubts. So, we planned to design a website which will have all the resources together in an organized manner along with mentors who once were in a similar conundrum to guide us. We also wanted to create a place for all the queries and discussion like in a classroom.

The problem it solves:

Numerous study materials are present throughout the web but there is no website where one can land and be confident to find a required resource. As a result, students keep surfing through an endless list of websites, youtube videos and online tutorials looking for the right material and mentor which wastes a lot of their finite time and sometimes also leads to unwanted distractions. With GuideMe, we bring to you the exact solution to this problem. We organize all the resources recommended by peers and mentors. We also allow every student to create courses with useful links to videos, websites and books themselves so that they can also help the student community. With the ongoing pandemic, physical classes are not possible so students are not able to have an interactive discussion. Hence, we address this problem by building an integrated discussion forum at our platform, GuideMe. In some districts of Odisha like Kalahandi, Balangir, Koraput only a handful of students are able to get selected at reputed colleges due to poor mentorship, guidance and lack of proper study materials.

Challenges we ran into:

More than 50% of our team are first time hackers and each of us is new to the experience of hackathons. Hence, it was a challenge for us to coordinate and distribute our work at first. Moreover, not all of us are acquainted with the tech stack that we have used for our project. It was really challenging for us to integrate our frontend with the backend to fetch and display our data accurately. With the Material UI being recently updated, it became a little problematic initially. Furthermore, using Firebase for our login system was demanding. Nevertheless, we spent hours helping each other and working in a synchronized manner to shape our ideas as best as we could within the time constraint.

To make a working model of our project we planned to build a fully functional and easy-to-use UI website using the MERN stack. For the frontend, we used Material UI to build and style our React components. We used Nodejs and Express for our backend and MongoDB as our database because of its document-oriented data model. We also used firebase authentication because we plan to make our login system support authentication using phone numbers, popular federated identity providers like Google, Facebook and Twitter, and more. We used Figma for designing the prototype of our website.