Cardinal - Your Education Assistant

What it does

Cardinal is an education resource finder that allows teachers to find and upload resources and lessons to provide students everything needed to catch up on subjects for which they are behind. Along with educational lessons and resources, Cardinal includes well-being resources to address the lack of well-being resources available on other educational platforms and to alleviate the trauma caused on both students and teachers by COVID-19 and other related stressors, such as school violence.

Inspiration

"I was inspired by how IndianaComputes and Minecraft: Education Edition, two services full of educational resources to aid with learning, had such an easy and understandable UI that allowed me to find exactly what I need to develop outreach events for my summer internship. The lessons and resources were great too! From that, I wanted to try to make something that would provide that level of ease for all types of educational resources and lessons. Especially now, when students are falling behind due to the COVID-19 pandemic and with how stressful teacher's lives are getting, we need something that can make teacher's lives easier and catch students up quickly and efficiently." - Vincent Langlois, Pro Squad

“My inspiration for the mental health resources comes from many students and friends around me struggling during the pandemic and their need for professional help. My sister and her friend are also working on an application that assists people's mental health and has a chat function.” - Anh Do, Pro Squad

“My inspiration comes from a long-standing interest in getting involved in the political sector. I have always held education as the issue at the center of that motivation, and through the integration of tech & business, it is the ideal partnership in forging the future of education for America’s youth.

Through incorporating mental well-being into our solution, it not only highlights how mental health tends to be neglected, especially in communities of color, but offers concrete resources for all parties involved.” - Reed Mathis, Go Squad

“My inspiration for this project comes from my own experiences with my two younger brothers at home during the pandemic who were struggling to keep up with their schoolwork because of how difficult it was to have access to all the school resources they needed in a remote environment.” - Ben Taczy, Go Squad

How we built it

All wireframes were created and edited on Figma and prototyped with Java. As one of our design decisions, we focused on keeping the UI as simple as possible. This design decision would allow any teacher or student to easily find and do what they can to catch up without wasting time understanding a complex interface. We also focused on making Cardinal adaptable to many learning environments, such as online or offline learning.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenges were to identify solutions to help teachers plan and execute their lesson plans, to help teachers and students discuss, comprehend, and process trauma and difficult situations, and to bring more equity of access to college prep, post-secondary, and workforce resources to schools and classrooms. To deal with these challenges, we focused on making sure our project would help teachers, highlight trauma and other mental health issues, and provide easy access to the uploaded resources.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Two Hi-fi wireframes were developed, showing how we want the UI to appear and how we want the user experience to be for both students and teachers. From these wireframes, a prototype Java desktop application started development.

What we learned

As a team, the most significant thing we learned was to effectively communicate on a consistent basis. Due to that, we stayed on the same page and on track to finish this project. During the brainstorming phase, we learned to take different aspects of everyone's ideas and build them towards our final solution. We also learned how to identify problems within our communities and social networks and how to build solutions to solve those problems.

What's next for Cardinal - Your Education Assistant

The most important early milestone is to complete the desktop application, then add new features such as classroom calendars and discussion pages, develop a web application, develop an offline version of the application, and then a mobile version. We want to make Cardinal an education assistant made for teachers, by teachers.