Welcome to Team Logout's Home page
Team Logout has been working to develop the Digital Backpack.
This is the first Student/Tecaher communication tool meant for offline use.
This web application is targeted to be used on Chrome and our features that we have developed are to make the transitions
between an online and offline experience, speciffically to aid students education from home.
Meet Team Logout
nmc288@nau.edu
jon23@nau.edu
jdn238@nau.edu
kpk54@nau.edu
Vigil-Hayes Capstone Client
Our Design Review II Video
Our Mini-Video "Elevator Pitch"
Project Details
The Problem
The world has recently seen the growing integration between education and technology, resulting in innovative solutions,
accompanied by inevitable problems. As COVID-19 presented countless obstacles to the world, it forced schools to switch
to online learning, having students attend class and perform their coursework from home.
Such a situation resulted in a large-scale issue on the topic of educational accessibility, considering that in the United States today, there are over twelve million K-12-aged students lacking adequate Internet access from inside their homes.
Numerous communities within the U.S., especially tribal nations, have been hit hard by this “homework gap”, and still suffer today. Analysis of the Native Americans’ predicament revealed that roughly one third of tribal lands do not have access to broadband internet, with the remaining population that does have Internet describing their connection as being “slow”, “spotty”, and “expensive”.
Students have had to rely on public hotspots such as local coffee shops, libraries, or fast food restaurants to complete assigned schoolwork. It is important to recognize the negative impact that this can have on one’s life.
So, this has the potential to severely diminish one’s education just based on an, often uncontrollable, variable. Sadly, there have not been many online tools or applications that have been introduced into this industry to try and mitigate this concern. We can clearly see that a new academic workspace that provides a means to obtain school work offline is needed to aid this situation.
Making life easier for the people already struggling is the overall goal that this project sets out to accomplish. We as a team have sought out to tackle the issues associated with the offline distribution of school-related resources alongside quality of life changes that will make the attainment of said resources that much more streamlined and efficient.
Such a situation resulted in a large-scale issue on the topic of educational accessibility, considering that in the United States today, there are over twelve million K-12-aged students lacking adequate Internet access from inside their homes.
Numerous communities within the U.S., especially tribal nations, have been hit hard by this “homework gap”, and still suffer today. Analysis of the Native Americans’ predicament revealed that roughly one third of tribal lands do not have access to broadband internet, with the remaining population that does have Internet describing their connection as being “slow”, “spotty”, and “expensive”.
Students have had to rely on public hotspots such as local coffee shops, libraries, or fast food restaurants to complete assigned schoolwork. It is important to recognize the negative impact that this can have on one’s life.
So, this has the potential to severely diminish one’s education just based on an, often uncontrollable, variable. Sadly, there have not been many online tools or applications that have been introduced into this industry to try and mitigate this concern. We can clearly see that a new academic workspace that provides a means to obtain school work offline is needed to aid this situation.
Making life easier for the people already struggling is the overall goal that this project sets out to accomplish. We as a team have sought out to tackle the issues associated with the offline distribution of school-related resources alongside quality of life changes that will make the attainment of said resources that much more streamlined and efficient.
The Solution
To solve this issue of inequality, Dr. Vigil-Hayes created the Digital Backpack, the first teacher/student communication
platform intended for offline use. The Digital Backpack, or DigiPack, is an opportunistic content delivery network for
students with unreliable access to the internet.
This means, essentially, that it is a system that can keep track of when students are online, and use that ‘opportunistic’ internet access to download resources for students and upload assignments that the student queued for submission while offline. By doing this, students can transition between online and offline learning with ease.
Our team has been tasked with expanding off of the current Digital Backpack. When we began work on this project, the Digital Backpack already had certain key features, such as managing classes, assignments, and submissions. The keystone feature of the DigiPack was its opportunistic downloading of assignments, and uploading of submissions for students.
Despite this, the Digital Backpack still had a little ways to go before it was ready for deployment.
That is where we come in. Our role in expanding the Digital Backpack consists of better connecting everyone with their school-related work by building new features into the system and developing a fresh and accessible user interface.
We are planning to accomplish this by expanding beyond just downloading student’s assignments for them. Rather, we will be making it possible for students to take home a slice of the internet with them and recreate the online experience even when they don’t have access to the internet.
This means, essentially, that it is a system that can keep track of when students are online, and use that ‘opportunistic’ internet access to download resources for students and upload assignments that the student queued for submission while offline. By doing this, students can transition between online and offline learning with ease.
Our team has been tasked with expanding off of the current Digital Backpack. When we began work on this project, the Digital Backpack already had certain key features, such as managing classes, assignments, and submissions. The keystone feature of the DigiPack was its opportunistic downloading of assignments, and uploading of submissions for students.
Despite this, the Digital Backpack still had a little ways to go before it was ready for deployment.
That is where we come in. Our role in expanding the Digital Backpack consists of better connecting everyone with their school-related work by building new features into the system and developing a fresh and accessible user interface.
We are planning to accomplish this by expanding beyond just downloading student’s assignments for them. Rather, we will be making it possible for students to take home a slice of the internet with them and recreate the online experience even when they don’t have access to the internet.
Our Solution
Redesign Student and Teacher UI
Student
This will be the main hub of how the student will be interacting with their classes. It will consist of the user interacting with and submitting requests in both of the submission and web search queues, viewing any and all classes they are enrolled in and their assignments, and seeing requests from the teacher for any meetings they wish to schedule.Teacher
This will be the main area of how the teacher will be interacting with their students and classes. It will consist of the user having access to all of their classes and viewing the students in each class individually. For each student, they can view their connection schedule and what assignments they have queued up to be submitted. Here, they can also see if the student has not submitted one or multiple assignments, to which they can flag the student accordingly. Lastly, they can request to make a meeting with a student(s) directly.Create Intelligent Searching Algorithm
The first is creating a Resource Searching and Downloading Algorithm. This searches on Google with specific keywords that the teacher provides to the algorithm, selects the resources they would like the students to use, and converts those websites into pdfs for students to use while offline.When a teacher is going to be adding an assignment for the students to work on, they will be asked to fill in the basic information, Title, description, due date, and their own files they would like the students to also use.
At the very bottom, they will be asked to provide a list of keywords to search Google for additional online resources. Once our system has found a list of 10 possible resources, the teacher can click on the links to make sure they are accurate to what they are teaching. They have an option to remove a specific link that they might not like and even have the option to research with different keywords to hopefully find new pages all together.
Once they are satisfied with the resources found by our system, they can upload the assignment and the system will then start the process of converting the pages to PDFs and downloading them.
Resource Rating System
Our second is to create a rating system for these resources and have the students rate them based on how useful they were. This will help the teachers know what websites have been doing really well and what has not.Once a student has submitted their assignment(s), they will be redirected to the ratings page where it will display all of the resources that they were provided for their assignment, and they can choose if they want to rate them or not. If they do, it will ask for a rating from 1-5 stars for each resource.
After they submit their ratings, they will be redirected to their home page and the server will take in those ratings and update our database accordingly. If the student does not wish to rate certain resources, they may leave the rating blank and simply move on.
Online Connectivity Heatmap
For our final solution, we will be creating an Online Connectivity Heatmap. A record of the time is taken when a student is able to visit their homepage. The system then records that current date and time into a CSV file. And it is from this CSV file that a heatmap for that student is created.So this feature is primarily working in the background of the user's experience. The recording of the date and time is conducted by Python’s own datetime library with the plot’s creation being done by the Matplotlib graphing library.
Whenever a student wishes to view their own recent connections or if a teacher wants to view a specific student's connectivity, they are both able to do this through their respective webpages.
Development Roadmap
Technology
MySQL
We will be using MySQL as a place to hold our database of students, classes they are in, contact information, etc. This will also store our models of each teacher and student, which will automatically check
which homepage that a user will be redirected to upon logging in.
Django
Django is a Python-based Web Application Framework that provides
a free open source to write web development with a strong
growing community. Django has a lot of functionality allowing
creators to create their web applications with quick and ease,
not needing to worry about importing other third party plugins
or having common security issues. Django has the ability to
scale enough to take on the large demands that we can put into
it.
Python
Python is a widely used programming language for front and back
end web development. Their libraries are all open source as
well. Python is used in the Digital Backpack to implement a
REST API for authentication management, and more.
MatPlotLib
We will be using MatPlotLib to visually display the students online connectivity period in a way that is easy for them and teachers to view and understand when they might have reliable internet access again.GoogleSearch API
We will be using the GoogleSearch API to fetch websites based off of what the teacher provides to our system. It will then do a simple Google search and return the top 10 results based from what the teacher provided and they can remove websites or even research entirely if they didn't like any of them.Master Diagram of our System
