Dringo: Welsh Language Tutoring

The Goal

Dringo Title/Logo

The Welsh language is an integral part of the heritage of Wales, but finding accessible, structured tutoring can sometimes be a barrier for new learners. 'Dringo' (which means 'to climb' in Welsh) is a web platform designed to bridge the gap between learners and Welsh tutors by providding a simple solution to book lessons and access welsh learning resources. The project is a collaboration between myself and a friend who is also passionate about language learning and web development.

My role in this project involves collaborating on the UI and frontend development of the site, ensuring that the user experience is intuitive for both students trying to book sessions and tutors managing their bookings.

Planning

Original brainstorming session notes

Before writing any code, we had to map out our plan for the project. The platform needed to handle user profiles, a scheduling system, and a directory of resources and posts. We focused heavily on creating a user-friendly interface that would make it easy for users to find tutors, book sessions, and access learning materials.

This phase taught me a lot about responsive design and ensuring that the platform works on a mobile phone and on a desktop computer, which is crucial for accessibility since many users will access the site from various devices.

Development & Challenges

A photo of the Github repository

Going from a plan to a fully fleshed out website is quite a challenge, especially for people who are new to web development. We were lucky enough to be able to attend a 5 day crash course on web development in the early stages of the project which helped us to get a leg up on the way we should organise our code and structure the project. We have been using a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the frontend, with a backend in python, specifically Django.

Since many modern web apps are incredibly complex and smooth, we need to spend a lot of time on the user experience in order to compete with any other platforms that are out there. This meant we had to spend a lot of time debating on the look and feel of the frontend of the website, often using tactics which social media sites use to keep the users engaged and coming back to the site. Since we will be using the website to accept payments for tutoring sessions, we also had to spend a lot of time on the security of the website and ensuring that we are following best practices in order to keep our users safe. We are considering using Stripe as our payment processor, which is very secure and well known, and would allow us to safely integrate payments into our platform.

We have now launched a beta version of the site and are currently testing it with a small group of users in order to get feedback and make improvements before we properly launch. We are also working on building up a directory of tutors and resources in order to have a viable amount of content on the site when we launch. This project has taught me so much about web development, project management, and was the project which gave me confidence to build this website in the first place, so I am very excited to see where it goes in the future.