Student: Jiaqi Liu, Lingyi Ju

Project title

Biazza

What and why?

The NYUClasses website and mailing lists are not effective and easy to use for students to ask course-related questions and receive notifications from their professors and TAs. Other commercial platforms such as Piazza have good functionalities and it contains user-friendly user interfaces, however, it is never safe to let a third party keep possessions of the student's information. The users will not know whether their personal information has been used by these parties for commercial hiring purposes. Thus, in consideration of privacy and security, we would like to propose and to build a website named Biazza. The Biazza website will have similar functionalities with Piazza that provides efficient means for communicating, but in addition, we will have some additional features such as every participant in the community can rate their favorite answer in the StackOverFlow like fashion. Biazza will also allow the instructor to create and to edit a course page on this platform.

For whom?

Our current target end-users for Biazza is the student body, namely, the students and professors/teaching fellows. Although this platform can also be used in companies or among a group of programmers for other communication purposes.

College students who need an online space to talk about classes and ask questions.

College professors/TAs who like to post course materials online, encourage discussions and answer students' questions in a way that everyone in the class can see the answers.

How?

An online forum where students can post questions either publicly or privately, answer questions posted by others, rate others' answers and professors, and they can also endorse the answers that they believe best resolved the problem.

The professor or teaching assistants can create course pages, post important materials, or making announcements to every student in the forum.

Scope

The forum will have quite some features that demand database involvement, user authentication, user role management, modeling of posts and answers that includes endorsing votes, and the separation of frontend and backend logic. The proposed functionality is somewhat complex, but it is our belief that it is doable for approximately 4 or 5 programmers in one semester.