ConnectED

Are you an immigrant looking for more info for your children's education within the American school systems? Parents work with consultants in ConnectED to be more informed on the US K-12 system.

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Inspiration

In the US, there are approximately 18 million minors who lived with one parent who is an immigrant according to data collected in 2021. As immigrants and children of immigrants, we often hear: "What vaccines do we need to school? Could you please tell me more about the college application process? What is GPA?" Since our family friends have younger kids, we often hear anxious parents wanting to make the best choice for their children's education and decide to come to us for advice. However, many parents feel that since they didn't study in the US education system, they aren't qualified to make decisions for their kids due to unfamiliar systems and language barriers.

What it does

ConnectED is an educational consulting startup that connects parents who are unfamiliar with the American Public School System with consultants who provide guidance to them on the K-12 education system. Parents can talk to consultants for more in depth explanations of the education system. Our website allows parents to schedule booking with the consultants and seek one-on-one guidance from the consultants.

How we built it

Our website is built on top of Wix. We used Canva for designing our logo and choosing our color schemes, Trello for project management, GoDaddy for our domain name.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into trouble trying to figure out how to integrate the ChatGPT chatbot with Wix. We originally wanted to use a chatbot with Wix Chat, but it turned out that you will need to create a server with Node.js or another server-side validation method which we were not able to do since the platform for Wix code cost money to use.

Another challenge we ran into was trying to translate the site. We used the auto-translate feature of Wix to include languages, but they had a word limit. If we had more money, we would be able to translate more words, but for now we decided to try to translate a little bit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of coming up with a startup idea. We were able to create a business subscription model and figure out how to create a startup out of the problem. We also conducted a small user study to understand how students at the hackathon's parents interacted with them. We had about 10 people respond, which was valuable to demonstrate some correlations between immigration status and parental educational involvement. We also realized that paywalls might negatively affect our ability to implement features we want.

Our survey responses: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uRA6gjZ9xqJCdl2IDxpde7CRh8MmNhDfgrAaW1KJE54/edit?usp=sharing

What we learned

We learned more concepts about venture capitalism through the workshops. We also learned a lot about CMS software and how it can be integrated with other tools to create a product. We learned a little bit about API connections when we researched how to connect OpenAI's tools or Google Cloud tools.

What's next for ConnectED

We hope to create a student portal and consultant portal. Right now, we built a parent portal to help parents learn more about the education system. We also hope to integrate a good chatbot that responds to parent questions.

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