Uschool
There are two ways of learning: linear fashion vs a more chaotic and exploratory process. Linear examples are: schools, universities, Coursera, Udacity and codeschool. The chaotic fashion is by pursuing bits and pieces in the context of an immediate need to understand something rather than because it's the next chapter in the textbook.
As a project part of General Assembly's Web Development bootcamp our solution was conceptualized, designed and programmed by a team of four.
Uschool allows learners to take note of the "chaotic" process and form a community of people who are studying the same subject independently. It allows for the tracking and organization of resources in the pursuit of creating a curriculum for others to follow and discover what you've learned .
System Analysis and Design
Like never before anyone can study any subject by simply browsing the web. However, the resources and knowledge attained from such a way of learning can be lost and forgotten because of the unstructured nature of the medium.
The Problem: The chaotic fashion of learning (independently through research) does not have a structured place to store the resources and methods used.
Once the functionality of the product was conceptualized and the MVP documented on Trello, we moved on to architecting the model relations.
Wireframes
Development
Technology Stack: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, HTM & CSS, Javascript, Ajax, JQuery, Foundation, Readability API, GIT.
Despite everyone on the team working the full stack, to better organize the development process we separated into two front-end and two back-end developers, one being the project manager.
The project’s code can be viewed on github.
Interaction Design
As part of design development, I explained the system through static hand-drawn wireframes to the team and then coded it.
One of the team’s main goal with this product was for users to have easy access to adding new course topics and organize their studying without any hassles, therefore I made sure to emphasize a “quick-content” plus button.
Uschool was conceptualized, architected, designed and coded in one week, still in beta its full interaction is not yet complete. Most of the courses on the website are test cases.
The best way to experience the product is to interact with Uschool yourself.
