Peer Power Foundation

PROJECT TYPE
Web App

STATUS
Done

INDUSTRY
Non-profit & Education

Introduction


Peer Power is a non-profit organization that recruits and trains high-performing college students, called
Success Coaches, to tutor in public school classrooms and mentor high school students to encourage active learning, valuing education, and being personally accountable for their futures.

What needed to be done?


Peer Power reached out to develop a solution that allows their success coaches to record how and when they engaged with high school teachers and students. They also wanted to provide a “code-along” learning experience to assist their IT lead with developing and maintaining this solution.

Challenges


  • We had to ensure this platform stayed flexible enough to integrate with analytics platforms, and other future systems, as well.
  • In addition to developing a solution that allowed capture of school, teacher and student information needed to feed the system, as well as capture success coach responses, we needed to ensure this data was exportable for analysis.
  • A quick solution was to use Zapier webhooks to allow a seamless transition of data from the app’s database to an Excel spreadsheet. This was a trade-off, as Excel may not be the long-term analytical solution, but it served the short-term needs and the integration was developed to allow easily switching in another integration platform at a later date.


Solutions


  • Throughout the development process, we communicated often with Peer Power to ensure the format we were capturing and storing student response data in could also be easily used (and transformed if necessary) for input into other systems in the future. Whether that be other tracking spreadsheets or a full fledged analytics system like PowerBI, we made sure to keep an eye on the need for a flexible data format for future needs.
  • The need for a flexible data format and the potential for needing to frequently update source data for the platform were key drivers from an initial design decision made to ramp up speed of the build process. Early on in the design and development process, we settled on the use of a NoSQL datastore as our database. Although this worked, we ran into concerns with the amount of processing, checks and balances, and updates needed when Peer Power's school rosters needed updating. Due to this, we tested and switched out to a SQL database which proved to be easier to manage and work with given the platform's specific requirements.

Development Process


  1. We kicked this project off as a Vanilla HTML, JavaScript and CSS project. With the number of interactions expected from the users, and dynamic feedback based on their engagements, and the lack of a need for SEO, we switched to a Vanilla React (very weird to say “Vanilla React”) project created with Vite. This provided a much faster development experience and allowed us to quickly get through all requirements.
  2. This was a relatively small project, and was built week to week in about five weeks.

Client Result


We were able to get the success coach survey app off the ground and usable in just five weeks! In addition to that, the primary technical lead from Peer Power learned a ton about the complexities of architecting a dynamic solution, ensuring it is maintainable, and developing with React.


Technologies Used

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