Inspiration
It started in the sun baked fields of a small Indian village, not during one of our brainstorming sessions. My co-leader and I were there for a different mission - helping farmers reduce devastating crop wastage. Yet, as we interacted with the village's young minds, eager to learn but lacking resources, a much deeper dilemma became painfully clear.
We’d grown up immersed in the IB curriculum in a bustling urban city, but their world was one of erratic connectivity, and a curriculum frequently hampered by language barriers.
We saw that their potential was going to be wasted, not just the harvest. If their basic right to a high-quality education was being so severely violated, how could these intelligent future changemakers resolve the many problems in their community? Our luxury and their struggle stood in sharp contrast. That planted the seed for this learning system.
We realized that we had to tackle the root problem of wasted human potential, and so we leveraged our skills and privilege to bridge that devastating gap, creating a reliable, low-connectivity-friendly AI-integrated platform to empower the very communities we seek to serve.
What it does
We developed a fully on-device learning platform. Our platform ensures that everyone, everywhere, has access to high-quality education. Our Offline AI Chatbot requires little hardware and operates without the internet. By utilizing a fully offline translation module that enables access to the chatbot in any language, so we are also able to target language gaps in the nation.
Our AI is built to run completely offline. It allows even the average person living in Rural areas with low connectivity to access our AI Platform. We allow the user to change languages*(English, Hindi, Urdu, Telugu, Gujrati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil)* even when there is no internet. We have included the following features to help make the learning easier and fun - Lesson Planner(Helps create personalized lesson plans for any topic) AI quiz generator(Gives explanations for why the answer is right or wrong) Mind maps Generator(We provide interactive mind maps that provide a visual tool for learning, which greatly improves the students' understanding and clarity of topics) AI Flashcards generator(Helps the student learn about the different topics) Notes Store(A place where the student can get notes from teachers all around India about all topics).
How we built it
We initially built our solution using JavaScript and Node.js with a python backend interacting with Ollama which ran custom AI models which help people in learning. Then we used a Fast API to run all the data from our backend to our frontend.
Slowly we realized that we cannot be running the AI models on laptops as Ollama takes up a lot of space on the PC and required heavy computing resources. We then used a custom library which ran ai models on phones extremely efficiently allowing for us to start porting our features from a web app to a local app which can be downloaded on any phone.
Challenges we ran into
We faced many challenges while developing this app, first the high RAM usage of Ollama which made it unfeasible for old phones which we are mostly going to be running our models on. We then shifted to LiteRT LLM which is a library used to run llm models on phones extremely efficiently, which led to us getting responses quite quickly even when running on a CPU mode.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to announce that we have made a fully working app which runs both on the web using Ollama but now we have also made a mobile version of the app to run our models locally. This allowed for us to create high quality app experience for the users as well.
What we learned
We learner how to target a global problem but start from our local level to solve it then slowly start moving up as we start targeting a regional and national level of learning experience as well. We have also learned how this change that we have created needs to be conveyed to the general public.
What's next for ConnectED
Our vision is to create the world’s largest decentralized school system, requiring zero new towers or cables. By utilizing the millions of unused smartphones already in people's homes, we can deploy advanced AI tutors to the most remote corners of the country immediately. We plan to scale from local donation drives to corporate partnerships, ensuring that a lack of internet access never equates to a lack of opportunity. Beyond just text, our roadmap includes deploying a conversational voice AI that runs entirely on-device. This transforms the donated smartphone from a digital textbook into a "talking tutor." By enabling auditory learning, we make education accessible to younger students or those with lower reading literacy, allowing them to learn by simply asking questions and listening - just as they would with a human teacher.
We want to make the same resources available to the 1.3 billion children who, according to the UN, do not have access to the internet at home. We want to allow these students to have access to some of the same learning resources we had access to.
Built With
- fastapi
- html
- javascript
- node.js
- ollama
- python
- sqlite
- vite
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