During the years in quarantine, I created MyClass, a realtime classroom-based messaging app where students and teachers can chat with each other. When COVID-19 impacted our lives almost everyone resorted to learning in a cyber environment whether that’s having a hybrid schedule or going full cyber. As we transitioned to learning online, I realized that communication between students and teachers became slow and hindered the learning experience. For many schools, students and teachers usually contact each other through emails. However, emails tend to be slow and are easily missed as more and more student emails overflow a teacher’s inbox. My friends couldn’t get their work done because they had no one to ask for help. And when they did get help, it was hard for the teachers to answer follow-up questions. Of course, there are other chatting platforms in the App Store. However, people are overwhelmed by features that they may never use and become afraid to use them. Moreover, these apps don’t provide great flexibility for students to chat with their peers. Students have to switch between different chatting apps for their group projects or clubs and these chats can be easily lost in their list of contacts by messages from family members or friends. I wanted to fix this and put everyone on the same page by creating a simple, easy to use chatting app made solely for school. MyClass has everything a messaging app needs from images, audio messages, message replies for easy question-to-answer chatting, and most importantly push notifications. As you can see, creating and joining a classroom is simple; all you need is a code. Classroom chatting isn’t the only feature in MyClass. Everyone is able to create their own groups for group projects or clubs for example. Anyone can join if given the code for it. Another chatting feature is private chatting. We can search for an user, or swipe on an user in the class settings screen to private message them. All of these features provide a wide range of flexibility for chatting; both students and teachers are able to chat however they want. Once deployed to the app store, MyClass will have a major impact on how students and teachers communicate with each other. They won’t have to juggle between multiple apps anymore because MyClass has everything they need to ask for help.
I created this app using a Javascript and TypeScript framework called React Native. I used Expo Client to run my app and to send push notifications. For my backend, I used AWS Amplify and its User Pool DynamoDB to store user accounts for login and sign-up. I used its graphQL Appsync API to store, fetch, mutate, and update user data like their name, push notification tokens, and more. Also, I used AWS Storage S3 to store image and audio data. In my code, I created components like list items and buttons for data mutations and I created screens to create the frontend. Each screen usually has two parts in the file’s code: half of it fetches data from my backend, and the other half displays this data to create the frontend of my app.