## EDUCHANGE

Helping students who have trouble speaking up.

## THE PROBLEM

In today's classroom, teachers are often frustrated with the lack of participation by students during class discussions. Most studies conclude that the main issues are fears of negative social repercussions, such as being judged by their peers and their teachers for giving a "stupid" response.

## OUR SOLUTION

High school is a sensitive age for students, and they care greatly about how their peers view them. We decided that an application that would both reduce their fears of negative social repercussions as well as gain them social recognition for their contributions would encourage them to participate in class discussions. Our app provides the teacher with a list of questions from students, all while keeping their names anonymous from their peers. If the teachers deems a question especially good, they can select the question to give them points as well as reveal the name of the student who asked them, giving them social recognition and validation. Similarly, peers can vote on their favorite questions asked by their classmates. Scores will be tallied to show top scores.
## Inspiration

 Looking around our team, we see a common trait that hinders us in the classroom: Shyness. It's hard to ask questions during class, especially in front of large audiences. We want to combat this issue by giving the large population of students like us an opportunity to engage actively in classroom participation with confidence.

Additionally, we tackled another problem. When questions are asked during class, many students have difficulty hearing what was asked as well as reviewing that material, as it may not always be in the lecture material. With our product, important questions along with the teacher's answers will be recorded and sent out via email post-lesson. This way, key supplemental information will be provided to students to further enhance their learning experience.

## What it does

To address this lack of confidence during class, we provide an anonymous question portal that allows any student to ask a question through voice or text. This is disguised as a word processor, further allowing anonymity for students who feel too shy to ask questions. These questions will be sent to the teacher portal in real-time, where the teacher can select questions to answer. Once the class has concluded, Q/A pairs will be sent out to the class through email.

## How we built it

We implemented our idea with a variety of frameworks. Using MongoDB, we first started the development of the database to store the questions being asked. This database served as our main backend tool to store and send the data collected from student and teacher responses. We utilized Twilio's SendGrid to email the data. Our front-end application displayed this information using React JS. To control our microphone, we used an interface between javascript and the Google Cloud API for converting speech to text.

## Challenges we ran into

 One of our main challenges was formulating the idea. Because we wanted to create a product that was meaningful to both us and our peers, we spent many nights brainstorming a project that resonated with us. Thus, Qloak was born. During Qloak's development, we also ran into many technical problems, such as making sure button clicks were working properly with incoming data, correctly timing that data, and sharing it between users. We worked together by breaking up and assigning tasks that would capitalize on each of our individual strengths. As a team, we were able to successfully coordinate with each other and ultimately integrate our code together.

## Accomplishments that we are proud of

 Our team is proud that we brought to life an idea that will meaningfully impact and help our fellow peers. Additionally, during this process, each of us had to tackle programs and concepts that we had never worked with before.

## What we learned

 We learned the importance of teamwork. At the end of our hack, we reflected on our accomplishments and realized how we were able to combine our talents together and efficiently finish our task. Working together allowed us to bounce ideas off each other to polish and strengthen. Also, we became stronger developers after this project, as the product required a wide variety of parts and provided us with full exposure to software such as React, mongoDB, and Twilio.

## What's next for Qloak

Our next step is to deploy our product to a larger scale so that we can increase visibility to a wider userbase. We would also like to work on a more intuitive user interface with additional functionalities to allow for smoother flows and interactions.
## Inspiration

We were inspired by hard working teachers and students. Although everyone was working hard, there was still a disconnect with many students not being able to retain what they learned. So, we decided to create both a web application and a companion phone application to help target this problem.

## What it does

The app connects students with teachers in a whole new fashion. Students can provide live feedback to their professors on various aspects of the lecture, such as the volume and pace. Professors, on the other hand, get an opportunity to receive live feedback on their teaching style and also give students a few warm-up exercises with a built-in clicker functionality.
The web portion of the project ties the classroom experience to the home. Students receive live transcripts of what the professor is currently saying, along with a summary at the end of the lecture which includes key points. The backend will also generate further reading material based on keywords from the lecture, which will further solidify the students’ understanding of the material.

## How we built it

We built the mobile portion using react-native for the front-end and firebase for the backend. The web app is built with react for the front end and firebase for the backend. We also implemented a few custom python modules to facilitate the client-server interaction to ensure a smooth experience for both the instructor and the student.

## Challenges we ran into

One major challenge we ran into was getting and processing live audio and giving a real-time transcription of it to all students enrolled in the class. We were able to solve this issue through a python script that would help bridge the gap between opening an audio stream and doing operations on it while still serving the student a live version of the rest of the site.

## Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Being able to process text data to the point that we were able to get a summary and information on tone/emotions from it. We are also extremely proud of the

## What we learned

We learned more about React and its usefulness when coding in JavaScript. Especially when there were many repeating elements in our Material Design. We also learned that first creating a mockup of what we want will facilitate coding as everyone will be on the same page on what is going on and all thats needs to be done is made very evident. We used some API’s such as the Google Speech to Text API and a Summary API. We were able to work around the constraints of the API’s to create a working product. We also learned more about other technologies that we used such as: Firebase, Adobe XD, React-native, and Python.

## What's next for Gradian

The next goal for Gradian is to implement a grading system for teachers that will automatically integrate with their native grading platform so that clicker data and other quiz material can instantly be graded and imported without any issues. Beyond that, we can see the potential for Gradian to be used in office scenarios as well so that people will never miss a beat thanks to the live transcription that happens.