Michael Fatemi, Alvan Caleb Arulandu, Cyril Sharma, Tarushii Goel
New technologies appear every day, but they are often inaccessible to people who don’t aren’t connected to someone knowledgeable or are not in a university covering the course. Self-taught options are unstandardized and difficult to improve. We decided that open-source education was the future of online courses, and created an online platform where people could publish courses hosted on Github repositories.
- The Cactus CourseWare Team developed a full-stack web application that allows creators, teachers, and developers to upload open-source educational materials to the public.
- These courses are then exposed using an accessible search for users to find courses they are interested in.
- Courses are rendered in the application with functionality for traditional content, embeddable animations, multiple choice / multiple select questions, and community-sourced explanations
- Curated resources are updated daily and can be retrieved from popular knowledge databases.
- Frontend: Typescript, React, ReMark, TailwindCSS, MaterialUI
- Backend: Node.js, Express, Mongo.db, Mongoose ORM
- Data Population: BeautifulSoup to scrape data from Wikipedia and generate sample tutorials.
- Hosting: Heroku (backend), Vercel (frontend)
- DNS: Google Domains + Google Analytics
- External APIs: GitHub API
- Over the course of development, we were frequently rate limited by the GitHub API before learning to use PAT authorization to enable higher rate limits.
- Integrating the backend API with the frontend interface was quite time consuming.
- Persisting state across the React component tree as well as maintaining a Module Tree datastructure to store courses.
- Rendering markdown documents with custom syntax / directives dynamically in React.
- Last evening at 5:00 PM, Heroku stopped GitHub deploy support, breaking out automated deploy workflow for our backend REST API. Multiple hours were spent circumventing this with a custom build and deploy.
- It works! After iterating upon the material UI specification, we were able to design and implement custom web design using react and Figma.
- We’re pleased with the look of the product.
- How to connect a MongoDB and Express/Node backend to a React frontend.
- The principles of artistic design
- Tailwind will destroy your styles
- How to interface with the github API
- How to render markdown dynamically in react.
- Future development would include making it easier to convert repos to the format our website expects.
- Adding more functionality, like progress tracking, community forums, etc.
- Encouraging course developers to upload produce content to post on our website