This is a project that is part of the S21 UWaterloo CSC x DSC Project Program!
BadLecturers offers students a platform to design, deliver, and critique explanations of subject materials. Share your lectures to deepen your understanding and to achieve a higher level of learning!
Mentor:
- William Lei
Mentees:
- Tom Han
- Eddie Zhang
- Jason Li
- Owen Wong
The philosophy of the BadLecturers stems from the tried-and-true Feynman technique, which is a learning method that exposes a student’s weaknesses in knowledge as they attempt to teach the materials they learned. We wanted to create a website that targeted understanding in studying, not just brute force memorization.
BadLecturers is a platform where any UWaterloo student can upload a "bad lecture" discussing any subject they want. Others can then watch and learn from the lecture, or they can provide constructive criticism in the comments below to help their peers.
Our frontend used React.JS and Bootstrap, while our backend was built with Firebase's Firestore and Cloud storage technologies. We also used Waterloo's OpenData API to retrieve course data and to dynamically create course pages.
We are proud of finishing a month-long project! This was the longest hackathon that any of us have participated in, so we are excited to have come out with a finished product. We also didn't know anything about firebase coming in, but we learned a lot about the technology and utilized it to its full extent.