Dash Class

An Augmented Interactive App For the Classroom

Too many times I've gone to class to see all my peers around me on their laptops or phones during class doing completely unrelated things; Browsing facebook, internet memes, and cute animal vids. In our age of technology, we are addicted to stimulus response. Social interaction has changed both online and in person. Dash Class is an app designed to innovate the classroom experience by creating an interactive digital room to assist the lecturer deliver data to students and keep them participating and focused.

View the website here

• http://bitbyte.site/dashclass/

Features

• Creating a room
  • Instructors create a room with a unique room code that can be shared with the class
  • They can create some multiple choice polls before class in a few simple clicks
• Crowd sourced questions
  • During lecture, instructors can monitor the question queue.
  • Students can ask questions that will appear on all other students and the instructor's screen.
  • Other students can upvote those questions to order them higher on the queue. How many times have you wanted to raise your hand but felt your question was stupid? This allows students to ask questions, and if other students also have that question, upvoting will show the instructor there are multiple students with the same lack of understanding
  • Instructor can click 'Answered' on the quetion queue to remove the question
• Polls
  • During lecture, the instructor can click 'open' on a poll and it will now appear on all students screens
  • students can pick an answer
  • once polling is complete, the instructor can click results and a break down of how many students chose which answer will display on the students screen
  • Clicking 'close' will end the polling period
• Chat
  • There is a twitch style chat that can be used for students to reach out to one another
  • This can be used to ask questions that can be answered by other students
  • Find study partners
  • or just have fun!

The goal is that this environment will not steal focus away from a instructor but rather keep their student body focused on class material and participating.

Technical Specifications

• Backend api built using Firebase
• Frontend built using Reactjs (2300 lines)
• Hosted on Micrsoft Azure
• Mobile app built using expo and can be found in a separate repo https://github.com/cedricholz/Dash-Class

Local Installation

npm install
npm start

then proceed to localhost:9090