Curio

Curio is a Learning Management Solution (LMS) for teachers to personalize learning for students based on their interests

Our Mission

We believe that learning should be personal and each student should be invested in what they are learning in school. With the current way that classrooms teach, while the base concepts are the same, students might not be that engaged by what they are learning since they can’t see how it can be applied to the areas that interest them. We believe that students will be much more motivated and retentive if concepts are related to their areas of interest. Not only is it more engaging for students, but it’s been proven that students can understand abstract concepts better when contextualized in a familiar subject matter. Our project allows teachers to provide these personalized questions for students which will help students to see how what they’re learning can be applied in areas that truly interest them.

How we built the project

As is typical with the software development life cycle, we had to clearly define our endpoints and the specific tasks that we wanted to allow the teachers to complete in order to start our web app. Our main goal was to allow teachers to craft personalized questions for their students through a dashboard that contains information and tools for managing the students in the course. As a team, we found the balance between the tools we knew how to use and the tools that we deemed necessary to achieve the endpoints we desired. We ended up settling on React for developing the frontend, and Node.js for the backend, and then in order to run our question generation algorithm, we settled on a Virtual Machine that we could send requests to generate questions for the teachers. We chose these features because we wanted teachers to have an easy-to-use interface in order to interact with the complex model behind the application, so we wanted to reveal only the highest level of features possible.

Challenges

Synchronizing integration between frontend and backend communication through REST API
Developing the architecture to host the model on the Virtual Machine

What’s next for Curio
Expanding integration for student input of interests through a form on the web application
Allowing for quizzes for students on the platform generated by the teacher through their dashboard