BACK TO SHOWCASE LISTPlease note that these projects are proof of concept exercises and in no way related to or affiliated with any of the referenced entities.
OVERVIEW
Hey everyone, I am @skr-suyash and this is a detailed analysis of my submission in the Adobe Use Case 2 Challenge.This project aimed at providing a platform for students and teachers to learn collaboratively. It also provides detailed statistics about the students and their engagement with their lessons.
HOW I APPROACHED THE CHALLENGE
The stack which I used was NodeJS coupled with the Express library for the backend and Handlebars as the templating library. I also used AJAX for easy DOM manipulation.
For the database, my choice was MongoDB as it works flawlessly with NodeJS. I didn’t choose any frontend frameworks as I didn’t want any hassle in setting things up. This time I paid close attention to the UI and it was greatly liked by the reviewers.
The first task was to create an authentication system which was done easily. Then the major challenge was to create a platform where the students would study their lessons. There I implemented the Adobe View SDK which was very easy to set up and it also had some great features. Then a blocker issue for me was to use the comments feature of the View SDK to store the comments. I was not able to do that but I implemented an alternative real-time comments feature with Javascript and stored the comments in the DB.
The interesting part of this challenge was to create a Whiteboard where students could take notes. After that, we had to use Adobe PDF Tools to create a PDF out of an HTML page. Here, I used a hack and created an image out of the whiteboard canvas and then converted it into a PDF. I implemented a Sticky Notes board as well as a whiteboard which was appreciated by the reviewers. Then comes the Analytics Dashboard part. For a detailed breakdown of the metrics that I tracked, watch the demo video or read the readme on Github. I think the metrics tracked were quite helpful for the teachers in getting a detailed analysis of the student activity on the platform. Two other very important features were that it was completely mobile responsive and it scored around 95 in Lighthouse which gave me full performance marks.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Overall, it was an engaging challenge that required a lot of work as many components had to be built. It was a great experience and all the community members were very active.
