6:30 pm Friday
This past weekend I participated in startup weekend in Austin. The theme was education, so we were required to make something that would solve a problem in the education field. Friday night was when everyone who had ideas all pitched for a minute each in front of the whole group. Lindsey and I voted for and chose to join Jake, who is a 16 year old high school student (and the only kid under 18 at the event!). He wanted to make an app that both teachers and students use in the classroom to help teachers gauge how well the kids are understanding the material and for students to be able to anonymously give feedback to the teacher during the lecture. Jake said at his high school students are provided with ipads and are allowed to use them. His idea was feasible and the most appealing. We ended up having 6 people on our team. Lidiya and Drew were in charge of the business model, Lindsey and Justin were in charge of front-end and Jake was our captain because it was his idea. After we all chose our teams, we stuck around to discuss the idea and how the app was going to look like. We wanted something very simple so that it does not distract the students during class. We also wanted the feedback to come up in real-time and color-coded so that teachers can have a computer screen or ipad propped up and have visuals during the lecture. We settled on a few designs and went home around 11 to prepare for the next day.
9:00am Saturday
We all got back to Capital Factory for another day. Breakfast tacos were served and I started brainstorming about the app. I started with a rough sketch of all the views and constructed all of the tables that will go in the database. I decided not to use any authentication because I only had a day and a half to finish this app. A teacher has an ID, and a username. A student has an ID and a username and can belong to many lectures. A Lecture belongs to a teacher and has many students. A feedback has an ID, a lecture ID, a student ID, a feedback type, and a timestamp. Organizing this perfectly is the most important part because when you start making models in rails and migrating, it might do some wonky stuff if you try to edit them later. Then I started coding. I decided to use Rails because 1. I wanted to get more practice with it and 2. it was probably the most time efficient way. I broke off from my team and was wired in from when it started all the way up until 5:30am with a few minute breaks for lunch and dinner and then I took a nap for 2 hours. I was pretty surprised that I didn't lose my mind or start losing focus but the fact that I was the only backend person on the team really made me want to get it up and running to not let anyone down. I'm also surprised that I didn't burn out during my 20 hour sprint. It was probably because I was having so much fun doing it. It's a good sign for when I have to code for 40+ hours a week right? I slept until 7:30 and then got ready for our last day.
9:00am Sunday
We all gathered back at Capital Factory for our last day. I knew I didn't have time to try to learn and integrate Node.js so for the real-time part, I decided to autorefresh.... you're cringing I know, but I still had to integrate all of the foundation and CSS code that Lindsey wrote into the application and it was solely for the demo. Definitely not a scalable way. By 1:00pm I had to finish everything up so that I could pass this onto Justin for deployment. And it works! Check it out here. I also put a demo under the pictures.
This past weekend I participated in startup weekend in Austin. The theme was education, so we were required to make something that would solve a problem in the education field. Friday night was when everyone who had ideas all pitched for a minute each in front of the whole group. Lindsey and I voted for and chose to join Jake, who is a 16 year old high school student (and the only kid under 18 at the event!). He wanted to make an app that both teachers and students use in the classroom to help teachers gauge how well the kids are understanding the material and for students to be able to anonymously give feedback to the teacher during the lecture. Jake said at his high school students are provided with ipads and are allowed to use them. His idea was feasible and the most appealing. We ended up having 6 people on our team. Lidiya and Drew were in charge of the business model, Lindsey and Justin were in charge of front-end and Jake was our captain because it was his idea. After we all chose our teams, we stuck around to discuss the idea and how the app was going to look like. We wanted something very simple so that it does not distract the students during class. We also wanted the feedback to come up in real-time and color-coded so that teachers can have a computer screen or ipad propped up and have visuals during the lecture. We settled on a few designs and went home around 11 to prepare for the next day.
9:00am Saturday
We all got back to Capital Factory for another day. Breakfast tacos were served and I started brainstorming about the app. I started with a rough sketch of all the views and constructed all of the tables that will go in the database. I decided not to use any authentication because I only had a day and a half to finish this app. A teacher has an ID, and a username. A student has an ID and a username and can belong to many lectures. A Lecture belongs to a teacher and has many students. A feedback has an ID, a lecture ID, a student ID, a feedback type, and a timestamp. Organizing this perfectly is the most important part because when you start making models in rails and migrating, it might do some wonky stuff if you try to edit them later. Then I started coding. I decided to use Rails because 1. I wanted to get more practice with it and 2. it was probably the most time efficient way. I broke off from my team and was wired in from when it started all the way up until 5:30am with a few minute breaks for lunch and dinner and then I took a nap for 2 hours. I was pretty surprised that I didn't lose my mind or start losing focus but the fact that I was the only backend person on the team really made me want to get it up and running to not let anyone down. I'm also surprised that I didn't burn out during my 20 hour sprint. It was probably because I was having so much fun doing it. It's a good sign for when I have to code for 40+ hours a week right? I slept until 7:30 and then got ready for our last day.
9:00am Sunday
We all gathered back at Capital Factory for our last day. I knew I didn't have time to try to learn and integrate Node.js so for the real-time part, I decided to autorefresh.... you're cringing I know, but I still had to integrate all of the foundation and CSS code that Lindsey wrote into the application and it was solely for the demo. Definitely not a scalable way. By 1:00pm I had to finish everything up so that I could pass this onto Justin for deployment. And it works! Check it out here. I also put a demo under the pictures.
Although we didn't win, this was a great experience! I got a ton of free food (and a sweatshirt) :D. I also met a lot of amazing people that participated (mostly educators that were passionate about education!) and got great advice from mentors. I also made a functioning app in 30 hours! It was probably one of the most fun weekends I've ever experienced and I'll definitely do this agai