Edumate: Collaborative instructional video sharing
I took a Mobile and Pervasive Computing class during my semester abroad at Singapore Management University. For my final thesis project, I created two different apps. One of them was "Edumate".
Think back to 2011. The feature phone to smart phone transition was at its peak in the wealthy world. Despite people taking and sharing pictures on their smart phones, there was no easy way for people to record videos and share them with the world. So before there was Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Vine, Periscope, Facebook Live, and YouTube Live, I had the idea of making it very easy for people to record short very-helpful and interesting clips from their phone and instantly publish these to their in-app social network.
I had a very specific use case in mind though, which would make it different from general social media apps. I had seen a recurring theme in teaching and tutoring: students having pointed queries, and teachers wanting to provide specific clarifications on student errors and misconceptions while grading or prior to assessment prep. I wanted to make it easy for teachers to visually walk through solutions and thinking, and quickly push it out to the entire class without needing to use a laptop or desktop computer. Push notifications were really novel at this time. So I built an Android application to do these, and leaned on YouTube's infrastructure for storage of such videos.
Funnily, because I was too cash-strapped at this time, I didn't actually ever get to test it on an actual Android phone, and resorted to imagining its pervasiveness while running simulations with the webcam on my beat up laptop.
