Background

Our project aims to facilitate communication between professors and students in large class sizes by allowing for students to channel their confusion with the simple click of a button. On popplex, students inform the instructor that they are confused and how they want the instructor to address it (e.g. “repeat”, “rephrase”, “elaborate”, “provide an example”). After class, students participate in a short survey that allows them to review what they learned. In turn, the lecturers receive both live and specific aggregate feedback that allows them to continually improve on their lecture.

Technologies Used: Django, HTML, and CSS

Timeline

Our project had the following timeline:

Week 1: Ideation and functionality, user flows and basic designs, base code
Week 2: Icons, logos and design palette
Week 3: Hi - Fi designs, Login functionality
Week 4: Front-end Completed, Confusion backend completed
Week 5: Testing and implementation, Teacher/Student models revised

Challenges

• Evaluating which tools to use for the project
• Modifying the default user class and login to accommodate for different student and teacher profiles
• Modifying the stylized bars that represent levels of confusion
• Implementing animations

Takeaways

• Elaine F: It was pretty intimidating to work on a project from scratch, in terms of coming up with an idea, discussing the functionality, and then just going through and building it. Some tasks that seemed intimidating, like integrating frontend and backend, were actually fairly simple once I took a stab at them. I definitely learned a lot, especially in Django, and I’m so happy with how it turned out :) Massive shoutout to grac for all the support.
• Arushi S: Throughout the course of this project, I learned so much about developing an idea from scratch and seeing it be built from many different steps. I learned a lot about Django and how the backend of websites work and also how the frontend is connected to the backend. I’m so happy with how it turned out and am thankful for my teammates and grac :)
• Michelle Seiyon L: I learned that I could actually do design and dev, which I thought was impossible just a few weeks ago. It was also rewarding to find out that I could go sleepless on many nights without realizing it. Although I got closer with my computer than I should be, I am excited to learn more about the basics and applications of the front-end. I can’t believe that we actually managed to bring our idea to life. I am so proud of our team, and also special thanks to Grace for believing in us and for actually spending the hours to help us out!
• Paul L: It feels great to be able to put things together! Having completed a full spark design workshop series but with just a bit of CSS / HTML knowledge there was a sharp learning curve helping out with front-end, but it was very rewarding and I’ve definitely learnt a lot.

Looking Forward

Looking forward, we could continue to expand our project by:

• Implement the confuso-meter page to overlay on top of lecture slides for ease of display.
• Update the confuso-meter in real-time using event listeners.
• We need to make the website responsive to mobile screen sizes so that students can not only use their laptops but also their phones to communicate their confusion.
• Make it possible for students to put time stamps during class so that they get a report on what they need to review at the end of class.
• Improve the design of a post-lecture survey that will not only help them to identify what they learned and did not understand, but also inform the lecturers on how to better respond to the student’s needs.
• Complete backend functionality of adding different classes, class review page, post-lecture survey responses, and analytics.
• Expand on information and analytics provided on the teacher side.