The problem Eureka solves

This platform aims at making doubt-solving easier without the need for sharing personal contact information. Joining college brings along a lot of new experiences and not all of them are good. There is a lot of ambiguity and our seniors are the only shoulders we can lean on. This dependence brings about a lot of pressure on the seniors as the juniors start calling or messaging them at odd hours and always expect correct answers without regard for their time. The number of groups students are added to, makes the task a hundred times harder. Eureka provides the students with a platform to ask questions without the need to pester anyone. It has a well-defined login and account feature to store all previously asked questions. Redundancy is reduced as answers to similarly asked questions are shown to the user. A leaderboard and an answer streak feature have been implemented to motivate the users to help out their peers. IGDTUW students will be able to lead an easier life, thanks to Eureka!

Challenges we ran into

This entire experience was completely new to us, so, it was moderately difficult getting accustomed to the regime. A doubt-solving platform is a very common one in the educational community and making it personalised as well as user-friendly was something we had to think about. Engagement is key and the target audience involves teenagers and people in their early 20s so, a way in which all of them would be motivated to answer was a riddle for us to solve. We wanted to make the site unique and had multiple ideas but the integration of all of them into a singular platform was a challenge. From the very beginning, we wanted to take into account our peers’ thought processes and needs alongside ours. We considered it important to give precedence to the requirements of the majority even if we had contradicting views. The design had to stand out to the target audience and therefore, multiple themes had to be looked at. Revenue is necessary to maintain the application but having an ad-free site ranked highest on our list of needs. This prompted us to look into other sources of revenue. Another problem we faced was having a consolidated website which helped with not only academic doubts but acted as a mentor for the students. For this, we incorporated different segments to ask doubts pertaining to coding or even different opportunities. We kept these segments separate to ensure that the website remains instinctual. To cater to our audience, we added features like a leaderboard and streaks for answers to motivate them to participate and hoped that it would also help promote our website. Even though this experience was very challenging, it was far more rewarding. We are highly grateful to have this be our first hackathon.