This past weekend, I participated at Startup Weekend Santa Maria with several Cal Poly colleagues. We decided to make Study Guard, a website that would attempt to curb freeloading in online study groups. We drew inspiration from websites such as StackOverflow, Reddit, and Chegg. We wanted a website in which classmates had to contribute to a study guide in order to view submitted answers to other questions. Users could also vote on submitted answers, in order to rank multiple solutions.

Users were able to join different classes or groups. The above screenshot shows the view of a single group. Members could invite new members via email, or create a new document.

A document consisted of different questions; in essence, it was a study guide. Members could add additional questions to the document as needed.

Before you could view the answers to questions, you had to submit an answer to a question yourself. Once you had done so, you could see all the answers and the sum of the votes an answer had received.

I was in charge of developing the website, after we had collaborated on the details of the project. I used Rails and Foundation, and was able to complete a fully functional website at the end of the second day. While developing the application, I was also teaching Rails to four other group members. I learned a lot about rapid prototyping, and working on Git repositories as a team. Elaine Lau created the excellent design.

Our group took 3rd place in the competition. At the end of the weekend, the team decided to not pursue the project further.