Assistive Technology - Educate Properly

Inspiration

The primary objective of social impact organizations is to make a positive impact on society, as such, these organizations are driven by causes instead of profit-making. My team and I effectively harness technical skills with design thinking, which is highly involved with critical/emphatic thinking to deliver tangible values to the end-users and stakeholders. For this project, we chose the Center School, located in Somerset, New Jersey as the focus of our socio-technical research and design efforts. We reached out to the principal of the Center School, emphasize them, thoroughly conducted the research by analyzing multiple educational experiments to empower students with disability. We proactively use Zotero to collaborate each researchers' analysis on the scholarly journals and educational reports conducted by a wide range of special education researchers.

As a head of socio-technical researcher, I directed the direction of the primary and secondary research methods of the team. We directly interviewed one of the professors, and a former high school teacher in Boston, MA, who possessed extensive experience in instructing students with disability. After the comprehensive research conduct, we used Indigo by Infrasitigst to design, and prototype the integrated software platform which enables students to keep track of their learning progress. The features were including Portfolio upload/download, an overview of school calendars/events, daily/weekly/monthly reports between parents and teachers.

Finally, we build an ultimate thoughtful and intelligent app "EDUCATE PROPERLY" which maximizes the students' learning efficiency by minimizing their specific obstacles which individual students experienced differently.

What it does

Some of the main functions (but not limited to):

• Students' individual portfolios: upload/download multiple projects, resources, and assignments, daily/weekly/monthly learning progress updates.

• The primary communication path between parents & teachers: daily/weekly/monthly reports from teachers and

• parents, send/receive questions & concerns regarding the student. General Purpose: Calendar, Center School's events/reminders/important messages.

How I built it

• Socio-technical research: Zotero, Trello, to work collaboratively. We minimized any latency while conducting an agile work approach.

• Demo-video: Adobe Videomaker

• The Software "EDUCATE PROPERLY": Indigo (web design tool), Figma (primarily for additional design)

• Microsoft Teams for online collaboration and meeting site

Challenges I ran into

My team and I worked very collaboratively. We effectively strategized delegation, segregation of duty, and thoughtful communication. Frankly speaking, I did not encounter any big roadblocks throughout the project. We have room to improve utilizing the work management app "Trello".

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We created the wave of innovation, especially for the social impact organization (NGO).

We built a very "intuitive, accessible, and minimal viable product" which intelligently tackles a wide range of challenges that the end-users (students with disability, parents, teachers) AND stakeholders (investors of the Center School, Principal, and Executive Board members) experience on a regular basis.

What I learned

I certainly learned working as ONE team. We think of every team member as each body part. In order to function as a whole to achieve an excellent result, we constantly support each other and educate one another to put different expertise of each teammate and build the optimal product as a whole.

Built With

• angular.js
• indigo
• zotero