Blaze

I am still learning.

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Inspiration

The education segment was drastically impacted due to the pandemic. The whole system had to be channeled from a physical classroom to a completely online form of training. Though the new system has its advantages, it has major drawbacks such as limitation of interaction and inability for a teacher to clearly monitor the activity of a student and his/her attentiveness in class. The online system has made it difficult for teachers to understand the student response during the classes.So we decided to develop an online training platform that provides better interactivity and monitoring features compared to the existing solutions.

What it does

Blaze is an online tutoring system, for conducting live online classes, discussions, online exams, assignment submission etc integrated into a single platform. It provides separate, user friendly portals for teachers and students for the same. Blaze tackles the major challenges faced in online education system like lack of proper student response, malpractices during exams, health issues caused due to increased screen time. These are done with live pop up quizzes, AI proctored examinations and blink rate analysis respectively.

How we built it

The product consists of a desktop application, built using electron. Students and teachers can register into the same, which can be customized separately according to the taste of the institution. During student registration, the basic details of the student, along with a model trained using his/her photograph obtained from the webcam is uploaded to the database. The registration is a one-time process, and later on the student can access the application by logging in with the credentials provided during registration. The application uses machine learning algorithms to detect the head pose to detect the attentiveness of students it also uses face detection algorithms for authentication. We are also informing the users when their eye blink rate is low and when they should take a break from looking at the computer continuously and sitting for too long.

Challenges we ran into

We developed this application through an online medium and used github for collaboration. The internet connectivity issues and communication issues were some of the biggest challenges we ran into.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We made into the top 15 teams that got selected to the power judgement round in the grand finale of Reboot Kerala Hackathon 2020. We have implemented features like eye health monitoring in an online education platform, which hasn't been adapted by any other online ed-platforms but is actually necessary in the current scenario.

What we learned

We learnt that distance is not actually a challenge to collaborate and work in technical projects . We also learnt how to communicate our ideas effectively through online communication channels.We learned how to apply machine learning techniques in real-time desktop application applications.

What's next for Blaze

The future aspects of the project include a mobile application that corresponds to the desktop application suggested which takes up minimal processing power, provision for teachers to adjust the requirements for student attention and exams, an interface for promoting extra-curricular activities for students, monitoring health of teachers which can be compromised due to increased screen time and sitting for a long amount of time. Also we are planning to expand the scope of the product to coaching centres and similar institutes.

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