Zoom wasn't built for online learning; but for 1.3 billion children, it's now their source of education. According to The United States Census Bureau in 2020, 63% of students felt the quality of online learning was worse than classroom learning.
That’s where Vroom comes in.
It's designed to bridge the gap between the screen and the virtual classroom by making it easier to communicate with and get support from your tutors.
Vroom sounds pretty great, right? One problem: Zoom doesn't have an API to manage live meetings. To get around this, we used a Selenium bot to monitor the Zoom chat, which interacts via Express Node.js with our React-powered Electron app. So the student can communicate more comfortably with the teacher on Zoom, and the teacher can better support the student on Vroom.
🙋♂️Ask your Questions Anonymously🤷♀️
Ever felt embarrassed to ask a question in class? With Vroom, just type !anon and your question - Vroom will ask it for you.
🔡Get translations in real time🔣
27% of Australian students have English as a second language, so it can be hard for them to keep up. With Vroom, you can translate to English directly in the chat.
🚀Let your tutor know they're going too slowly or that you need help - embarrassment free.🚀
Using the !slower, !faster, and !help commands, students can tell the tutor to drop or pick up the pace or get help without the publicity - only the tutor can see the message.
📈Track your Students' Progress📉
With the !progress command, teachers can see what students are working on, allowing them to pace lessons accordingly. On the student end, they can share this important information with clogging up the chat.
📊Build and Monitor Polls📊
Vroom allows tutors to send poll questions to the chat, and collect student responses in the chat using the !vote command. This streamlines the polling process and makes it easier than ever before for students to participate.
📋Build and View Lesson Plans📋
Teachers can create new plans for lessons, including topics and allocated times, all in Vroom! They can also import existing plans into the app.
Plus some other handy features:
!now- find out where the class is up to in the lesson plan!attend- get the zoom meeting attendance list!commands- get a list of the all the commands available in Vroom
By 2025, the online education market is projected to be worth around $325 billion! (Chernev, 2021)
Our main audience is students, teachers, and tutors, but Vroom doesn't stop there - here are some other ways Vroom can assist:
1 . Conducting votes on agenda items or motions in business meetings anonymously - over 40% of Fortune 500 companies use it to train their staff (Chernev, 2021)
2 . Tracking progress on tasks in meetings
3 . Helping cross-cultural teams achieve more with the in-chat translation feature
- React for the frontend
- Bootstrap for frontend styling
- Electron to create a desktop application
- Express.js to manage the local backend
- Selenium to interact with the Zoom Web Client
- Google Translate API to translate messages
- 10:21pm, Saturday: Zoom rolls out an update to their UI, so Vroom can't timestamp the requests properly anymore
🤠🙃
- Clone the repository and run
npm ito install dependencies - If on Windows, run
npm run devto launch a complete version of the application - If on Mac or Linux, run
npm run dev-macto launch a complete version of the application
- Clone the repository and run
npm ito install dependencies - If on Windows, run
npm run dev-testto launch the application with a dummy backend - If on Mac or Linux, run
npm run dev-mac-testto launch the application with a dummy backend - For all platforms, run
npm run backendto launch only the backend and selenium
- Sammi Millett
- Lilian Hunt
- Rhiannon Hames
- Andrew Esteban