BetterTA — Better TeachAssist

What is BetterTA?

BetterTeachAssist (BetterTA) is a drop-in replacement for the YRDSB grade portal: TeachAssist. BetterTA offers 1:1 grade accuracy, a modern user interface, and several features that TeachAssist lacks. BetterTA is built using React Native and Expo on the frontend, and a combination of Supabase and custom services on the backend.

How does BetterTA work?

We use a high-performance Go-based web scraper to fetch, parse, and output structured data from TeachAssist's website, which is then passed to the mobile app for display in a user-friendly interface. Furthermore, BetterTA includes an opt-in 'sharing mode.' Enabling this feature allows students to give us permission to anonymously collect their grade data. We then process this data to compute various statistics and insights, which are then available to students in the mobile app. (e.g. class grade distribution, school-wide grade distribution, etc.)

BetterTA also features a school ranking system, which uses grades shared by students to rank schools across YRDSB. We use a metric we coined called the Senior Academic Index (SAI), which averages the grades of a school for students in senior years (Grade 11 and Grade 12) in University and Mixed level courses to accurately measure a school's senior academic performance.

Another feature we have implemented is the YRAA page. The York Region Athletics Association (YRAA) has a website that shows the standings and schedule of various sports across the York Region. We use a scraper to fetch this data every 15 minutes and display it in our app so that students can easily refer to our app as a central location for their academic and athletic needs.

Features

• Modern, user-friendly interface
• Optional data sharing mode
• Course-by-course and school-by-school analytics
• Integration with YRAA to show sports rankings and games
• Grade prediction
• Class chatrooms
• iOS and Android support

Grade History

One of our key UX features is the interactable grade graph that can be scrolled through.

Grade history scroller

My Contributions

• Implemented the scraper in Go to fetch and parse raw HTML data from TeachAssist's website
• Designed much of the app's UI and implemented it in React Native
• Implemented grade prediction and data sharing features
• Implemented a smooth onboarding experience
• Designed website landing page
• Designed much of the app's marketing materials

Only YRDSB students will be able to login using their TeachAssist credentials