Ask HN: Feedback on a web app working with Moroccan schools | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Feedback on a web app working with Moroccan schools

2 pointswhy-el2 comments

This project is based in Morocco.

As part of a class during my last semester at university, I want to build a web application that links student volunteers and primary or secondary schools in my university's poor surrounding region. The application will enable a student with a specific profile to find opportunities to volunteer at a school that needs his or her skills. For instance, a student who is proficient in French and have a couple of hours to kill can search my application's database and find a school that needs him or her right away.

The motivation for this is straightforward. The university I attend requires 60 hours of social work before graduating. Most students procrastinate on this and end up squashing all these 60 hours in one place where it is hard to quantify what they did. It is also rather unfortunate that most of these students, lacking a tool to find places to work at in the Atlas region (where the university is), end up doing social work in far less needy places in their hometowns. The schools in this region desperately need help.

I am think a stack of Rails and Backbone with cloud hosting. Student verification will be done through their emails, and expansion to other universities rests upon the condition that they offer emails to their students.

My current concerns are how to register schools and how to get them to provide feedback for the work students provided. The students are in a much better place to frequently check the service; the school teachers or managers, who most likely won't have access to Internet, don't. I was thinking of registering the schools rather manually, with optional online registering for those who can afford it. Any ideas on this and other remarks are most welcome.

Hey,

This is a very nice idea. I guess with the limitations you face in terms of teachers and principles not having access to your web platform, you can resort to doing things manually, but this is only feasible for a small number of students (and hence there is no need for cloud hosting at the points). AUI Professors might bug you about this during your presentation.

Suppose you already have a set of schools involved in your project. So you talk to the people managers and you decide to create an account for them in your platform (PS: AUI professors love the word platform. Abuse it). An easy way you can handle validating a student's work is to have the principle mail you the forms (nobody wants to do that). As an alternative, you can let them sign the usual documents, hand it to the student who then validates their own work online and uploads the scanned (pdf) version papers as proof. Note that nobody at AUI takes a look at those paper unless a student's work seems extremely suspicious when they're presenting it (and everyone has to presenting, so that adds a little bit of validation to the platform, though relying on this is merely avoiding the problem).

Another solution that seems interesting (at least to me) is give principles and teachers passwords that they can handing to students once they finish their work. Of course a password doesn't mean one simple word since students may share. it may be a hash of the students name/id, date of delivery and school's info (principles name or other info). Coming up with this password is the tricky part since it has to be easy enough for everybody to compute (no PC required), yet not obvious for student to understand. It should also be easy for you to compute based on information giving by the student and compare it to the one the sudden supposedly received from the principle.

Example (I gotta let my geek out a bit so here is an example in JSON):

{ id: 15383, school: 23546, date: '30/8/2012, principle: '324324' }

===> just add all the freaking numbers ==> 365211 ==> ask the student for this info when they're validating their work ==> of course they don't know the principle's or the school's id so now way they can know how the output is generated. ==> if they enter the right info, you compute. if it's good, they're validated. If not, send them an F*U message, although I don't think anyone will try to fool the system especially if you use their REAL AUI ids and the university fully endorses this project.

This is security by obscurity. You can think of something better.

Peace out. Rorchackh

Thanks Rorchackh (Who goes to the same university).

Schools will also have their own accounts managed by school managers or competent teachers, so a school is associated with an account and a profile that students can check and contact.

The tricky part is registering these schools. Some papers maybe required, so for instance the school might be asked to send an official document with school name and capacity and needs and all that. Once a student works or volunteers at a school, he is profile will be updated accordingly. If anybody at the school has access to the account, they can log in and note that the student finished his or work.

Maybe I will start by looking at schools depending on how they can access the app. Or maybe we will integrate SMS, who knows. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com