Connected Learning: an education-focused app linking parents & mentors
Connected Learning is an open source app developed at the #UKvsCovidHack. Its aim is to connect isolated parents with community mentors.
Due to weeks in isolation, parents are faced with a frenzy of education and entertainment resources across Google Classroom, Microsoft 365, Facebook, YouTube and via parent groups on WhatsApp. In response to this overwhelming amount of information, Maslaha is seeking to solve some of the challenges that have arisen due to this rapid introduction of technology.
Challenges identified:
- Parents feel overwhelmed as they quickly try to adopt new technologies to support their children’s education.
- Closure of schools and local libraries predominantly affects families living in overcrowded and/or precarious homes.
- Parents who do not speak English find it difficult to navigate resources and access the right type of support.
- Children are encountering feelings of isolation away from their classmates and teachers. Helping families access the right resources through technology could help families connect with one another.
- Parents who work in shifts or long hours find it hard to find time to browse through all the resources currently available.
These challenges were presented by a Maslaha representative at the #UKvsCOVIDHack. As a response, a group of women came together as the #connect-educate team to develop Connected Learning, a web application that aims to support educational programmes such as Schools with Roots and families across the country.
What is Connected Learning?
Connected Learning is a platform that helps parents to access mentors and online resources to support their children’s needs and wellbeing.
We placed the parent’s experience at the heart of the design, providing:
- An easy-to-use landing page where parents can raise questions for mentors.
- Simple registration so busy parents can submit requests quickly.
- An offline SMS journey for parents who do not have access to the internet.
- UI for parents who do not speak English to increase accessibility.
The Development
Most of us are familiar with ReactJS and felt using the framework would allow us to scale and build a more complex application. For styling, we are using Semantic UI React to build pages quickly without spending hours on CSS. We’ve also used Redux and Axios to manage state and to connect with the backend.
In addition to a user-centred frontend design and development, the app uses Ruby on Rails in the backend.
We decided to create a Rails API so we could take advantage of handy authentication gems like Device to create secure user accounts and for logging in easily. We’ve worked on a variety of endpoints e.g. creating requests, parent and volunteer profiles, listing all volunteers, amongst others. We’ve also been using Postman to document these endpoints and have worked throughout the weekend updating these as we create new ones.
The Demonstration
The Code
Our project is open-source, so please feel free to contribute in any way!
You can find our backend repo at connect-educate-backend and our frontend repo at connect-educate-frontend.
Meet the Team
We’re a diverse group of women with different skills and levels of experience but with a common goal: to help parents throughout this crisis in any way possible. It has been two days of great collaboration and teamwork and we can’t wait to keep supporting this project after the hackathon.
- Aisha D’Souza: GitHub, Twitter, LinkedIn
- Fiona Mitchell: GitHub, LinkedIn
- Ines Guerrero: GitHub, Twitter, LinkedIn
- Latifa Akay (Mentor): Twitter, LinkedIn
- Melenie Schatynski: Twitter, LinkedIn
- Michelle Brien: GitHub, Twitter, LinkedIn
- Mindy Jhakra (Organiser): GitHub, LinkedIn
- Rebecca Fitzsimmons: GitHub
- Roshini Mahtani: LinkedIn, Website
- Sandeep Thandi: LinkedIn
- Win San Pang: GitHub, LinkedIn
Please feel free to contribute to our Github repos, no matter your level of knowledge; every little bit helps!
