Education Oracle

Breaking the education gap by providing free, interactive counseling services to students everywhere

Inspiration: Educational Barriers

Students from disadvantaged neighborhoods face a fundamental problem: they lack access to the counseling resources that can help them achieve. Unfortunately, there is a tremendous shortage of counselors. For instance, in California, the ratio of available counselors to students is 1 to 1000.

The dearth of guidance counselors is a source of the widening of educational gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged youth in America. We hope to solve this issue through our project.

Our Solution: A Guidance Counselor Chatbot

Our solution, the Education Oracle, is an interactive guidance counselor chatbot. Students can interact with the chatbot, ask friendly questions, and receive conversational responses that provide easier-to-understand suggestions. This following features are implemented or will be included in the future: -provide information about summer opportunities -match students to colleges based on their priorities -explain difficult concepts like financial aid and the college application process -provides consolation on ivy day -crowdsourcing of expert opinions to develop a database of answers to help answer a variety of questions

Challenges we ran into and what we learned

Our entire team had no prior experience in web development, so we heavily relied on tutorials and online resources such as Codeacademy. Features that were ostensibly trivial such as receiving input from the user using HTML turned out to be some of the most difficult aspect of our project. But we are all very glad how the final product turned out to be and succeeded in gaining basic experience in HTML/CSS/Javascript.

What's next for Education Oracle

Eventually, we hope to increase the versatility of our chatbot in the types of responses it can provide using machine learning algorithms that factor in student characteristics. By implementing this in conjunction with crowdsourcing, we hope to make this an effective tool to level the playing field in education.