Mission Statement
We are EchoHacks, and we aim to build applications that connect people together in unique ways. Our vision is to revolutionize the way people and technology communicate to each other and with each other in a cost efficient and simple way.
Inspiration
As freshmen at NYU, our team ran into a lot of problems first semester, looking for specific yet detailed explanations for certain home works (WebAssign, Programming questions, etc). However, most forms of information were either not specific enough(the general dedicated tutoring videos), or just hard to understand (Most text based help sites), especially writing certain equations once taking calculus. So, we decided on a different approach to help students like us: user submitted videos!
Our ultimate goal is to make sure that no student ever has to attempt to finish homework that he or she does not understand. Regular text based replies have been done countless times, creating another website that merely recreates something that already exists is pointless. Which is why we changed it up and provided a better, more responsive, and more personal way to help students understand their homework.
How it works
We loaded a Youtube api that would allow our website to access our users webcams, in order to record and post videos quickly. This also solved our data storage problem, as we were worried as to how exactly we'd store each video.
Challenges We ran into
Our first attempts at creating this web-app, was to make an iOS app. Unfortunately, none of us had any experience with iOS, and none of us could run OSX. We also had some altercations with the back-end, as most of us were extremely unfamiliar with it.
Accomplishments
Getting the You-Tube API to work felt amazing!
Watching the web-app come together was extremely fulfilling, after all the hours we put into it.
What I learned
Myself and my teammates had actually done a lot of Research on Parse.
What's next for NYU SOS
The next step for NYU SOS? Tackling the mobile field, where our eyes were originally on. We plan on creating a multi-platform app, with cloud based storage for problem posts. Utilizing the front facing camera of the mobile device(think Instagram, but more educational) to record videos, users would be able to reply to other user's questions. Each question would be separated into different general topics.
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