First Round

Every day at MIT, students and faculty alike use thousands of documents. Professors share course notes with students, students turn in assignments to professors for feedback, and both prepare articles and papers for publication. However, without collaboration between readers and authors, the documents are not improved, despite their heavy use.

On the class level, many professors currently have high-quality notes, however they are disconnected from the classroom in that students’ course note-reading experience does not directly impact what is discussed in lecture. A professor rarely knows if his students have read the notes or with which sections they may have struggled. Similarly, the professor does not necessarily know which parts of the lecture were confusing.

With Bookxor, we set out to provide professors with analytic and feedback tools to better understand how students learn outside of the classroom, while also providing students with tools for collaboration with each other, and further instructor interaction.

Students often face the daunting and time-consuming task of reading articles among articles. Oftentimes, it’s more efficient and effective to skim it first. Skimming texts is an art that takes time to hone. Some people have trouble learning how to skim because they don’t know what and where the keywords and sentences are.

CrowdSkimmer is a Google Chrome Extension that allows users to quickly skim websites and articles by showing them the keywords and key sentences.

All MIT students have classes, and thus all MIT students have homework assignments. Some students are capable of completing their assignments on their own. However, the vast majority of MIT students have learned that the most effective way to complete homework assignments is to work together with other MIT students in groups or ask an instructor for help. Working together in groups provides MIT students an opportunity to better comprehend the course material as well as foster teamwork. Unfortunately, there are many external factors that make organizing study groups troublesome. It is very unlikely that multiple MIT students have the same class schedule. Many MIT students participate in sports and clubs. Many MIT students live in singles or live a sizeable distance from other students in their classes (or a combination of the two). Massachusetts weather may deter traveling long distances with its humidity, storms, and snow. As a result of these factors, many students may find difficulty in organizing study groups and many are deterred completely from participating in any. We feel that P-set Central will help MIT students find and participate in study groups.

From observation and personal experience it seems evident that the current tools available to aid students in course selection do not do enough to ease the process. These difficulties arise in scheduling classes for a particular term and also for developing an overall plan of courses to take to complete various major and institute requirements.

With Planner, a student is currently able to enter a set of classes that he/she would like to take in a given semester and the set of possible non-conflicting schedules are displayed with the student able to go through the possibilities to find the optimal schedule. This takes out most of the guess work that other tools such as Picker have inherent in them. Aside from the power of being able to quickly construct schedules for the current semester another goal for Planner is to be able to help students plan which classes to take on a multiple semester basis, accounting for classes that are only offered in particular semesters and years as well as major and institute requirements.

BooksPicker grew out of our own frustrations as students buying books. The COOP’s prices were absurdly high, and the process of buying books elsewhere was time-consuming and tedious, especially when we wanted to compare offers between online merchants and students. But above all we did not like the fact that we could not just enter the classes we were taking to find the books we needed.

We designed BooksPicker which allow students to search for what textbooks are required for their classes, pick the ones they want and look for the best prices online, the Coop or locally by selling the books directly to other students. We connected BooksPicker to numerous online stores such as Amazon, AbeBooks and Half-Price Books to get the best textbook offers online to students. For local sales, we developed a local textbook marketplace.