The theme of Eduhacks 2017 was to create and code something that would facilitate a better and more well-rounded education system for students today. Our team delve deep into research and started brainstorming. What is something we can use daily that would improve our school lives?
While struggling to check our homework for the next few days, we finally realized the exact problem we wanted to solve was right under our noses. We had no centralized platform to check everything school related. To check our courses, we had to go to one website, to check our homework, we had to go another, to check for school related hours, we had to use Google.
With the idea of an easily accessible dashboard in mind, all five of us got to work. I mainly worked on the look and design of the dashboard cards. We wanted to represent each piece of necessary school information as dashboard cards on the web app.
We wanted Dashview to be a dashboard that students would just leave open and have their feed constantly updated with information they need to know. Users can even add and delete cards to their liking, and those could include, AMS event cards, club cards, course cards...etc. We also created a task card on Dashview, in which we connected Google Home to it, for users to better manage their time.
Our savior for all the little cards on Dashview was the Polymer.js framework. Since all of us except one has not worked with Polymer before, we had to learn on the go, and try to code in an unfamiliar language.
Steve was our only team member who was extremely proficient in Polymer, and JS in general, was constantly bugged by all of us who constantly needed help since we were so new to the environment. As you can tell, 50% of our hourly sprints was him teaching us what to do.
24 hours later, who knew we would be standing in the final podium presenting as one of the top five finalists of the hackathon. And who knew we would be the recipient of its ultimate prize of $10,000. We simply created Dashview seeing a need that we wanted to fulfill in our daily lives, but I guess everyone else felt the same.
We were immediately interviewed after our win, and Ubyssey, our campus news and media outlet, covered the hackathon event in an article below:
Dashview Press