Desk is a web application that helps aspiring self-learners be more efficient, motivated, and organized while self-studying or learning a new topic.

• The app allows users to keep track of all the resources they use while studying and makes it easier to find new resources to learn from.
• Users will be able to easily view what resources they are currently using or have used previously.
• In addition, they will be able to browse other users’ resources, with ratings, reviews, and tags so that it is easy to decide on a new resource to start studying.

I built Desk with Stef Ren, Catheryn Li, and Runpeng Liu as our final project for MIT's Software Studio (6.170) class.

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Current solutions for self-study rely heavily on site-specific material; for example, Coursera and edX help track progress through a course that is not user-specific and cannot be modified or augmented with other study materials.

Our app’s approach will allow users to keep track of their personalized self-study track. Desk allows users to easily find materials that are complementary to the resources they are already using.

In order design a web application that effectively helps users self-learn, we identified key concepts we would use, as well as purposes and operational principles for each. Here are the concepts used in Desk:

• Track: A Track is a user-specific collection of study resources.
• Resource: A Resource is a book, website, or other reference material.
• Topic: A Topic is an area of study.
• Vote: A Vote is an indication by a user that a study track is useful.
• Rating: A Rating is score out of 5 stars indicating the quality of a study resource.
• Status: A Status is a color-coded progress indicator for a resource.

To describe the relationship and constraints between different elements of our application, we diagrammed a data model:

Check out Desk for yourself here!