Edu Bites: Bite-sized Shorts for Student Learning

EduBites: Transforming Learning into an Engaging Adventure! Discover personalized, TikTok-style videos that turn education into a fun and dynamic experience for every student! Let's grow together!

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Edu Bites - Our Project Submission for ForestHacks-Hackathon!

In today's digital age, many educational tools are static, one-size-fits-all solutions that fail to engage students dynamically. As education increasingly moves online, students often find it difficult to locate tailored content that meets their individual learning needs. This is especially true for younger learners who might need quick, digestible lessons on core subjects like math, English, science, or history. Our project seeks to solve this issue by creating an intuitive, personalized educational app that mimics the style of platforms like TikTok or YouTube Shorts but focuses on delivering targeted educational content.

The Problem: Students often struggle to find learning resources that cater to their specific learning levels and needs. While platforms like YouTube offer educational content, they lack the personalization and curation needed to keep students engaged and progressing in their studies. The algorithms in entertainment apps are well-suited for keeping users hooked on content, but they are rarely designed for educational purposes.

Our Solution: Our app combines the best of both worlds—an interactive, algorithm-based content feed like TikTok, but with a focus on delivering quality educational videos. The app will recommend videos to students based on their past preferences and feedback, allowing them to engage with subjects in a way that keeps them interested and motivated to learn.

How It Works:

Video Categorization: We start by preloading a list of videos from YouTube or other educational sources, categorized by subjects like math, history, science, and English. Using transcripts and metadata, each video is analyzed and tagged for easier retrieval based on subject and difficulty level.

Content Delivery: The app will deliver a stream of these videos to the user's device in a format that can be easily consumed, such as a mini-player. This creates a seamless, user-friendly interface for navigating educational content, keeping it interactive and short-form.

Feedback-Driven Personalization: The app's recommendation engine is driven by user feedback. If a student thumbs-up a math video, the system will recommend another math video from the pool. If they give a thumbs-down, it will offer content from a different subject. This allows for a dynamic and personalized learning experience that adapts as the student interacts with the app.

Why It Matters: Our app not only makes learning more accessible but also ensures that students are receiving content tailored to their learning progress. By combining the engagement techniques of popular social media platforms with targeted educational content, we aim to help students of all learning levels improve and retain information in a fun, personalized way.

Our project streamlines the discovery of educational videos and takes a data-driven approach to content recommendation, solving the problem of static, uninspiring educational apps.

Team:

Yekalaivan: Full-Stack Developer & Project Manager

Sree: Back-End Developer & Research Analyst

Galina: Back-End & AI Developer

Tanishka: Full-Stack Developer & UX/UI Designer

Challenges we ran into:

  • Meeting Consistently: Our team have different time zones and having to meet was extremely challenging. We then started to budget our time to ensure that we can efficiently work on our project.

  • Knowledge/Experience: All of us except Gina had beginner knowledge in most of our skills. We had to rely on learning through tutorials and creating sample projects in the meantime. We then started to look at other people's projects and started to learn slowly, increasing our passion and hunger to learn!

  • Confusion: As we didn't have a project tracker present, we were really confused. We then setup a project tracker which helped us be consistent with our tasks which helped us plan our meetings and schedules.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

  • Knowledge/Experience Acquired: We were able to learn so much html, css, and even explore the worlds of backend coding. Some of us had experience in different languages and as we came together, we were able to teach other and provide resources which ended up increasing our experience!

  • Network: We had the ability to talk to students, teachers, and parents which allowed us to network and help develop our idea and our features. Being able to network has allowed us to strengthen our bonds and develop our communication skills.

What we learned:

  • We were able to learn so much in html, python, css and develop knowledge in MongoDB (which wasn't used) and sqlite.

  • We learned how to communicate with each other effectively, increased dependability, learned to budget our time, use our time effectively. Not only that, along the way, we got to meet and learn from some awesome people who gave us tips and recommendations when learning!

What's next for Edu Bites: Bite-sized Shorts for Student Learning:

  • Expand Content Categories: Diversify topics to cover more subjects and specialized areas of interest for students. As of now, we only have content in math, English, science, and history. We plan to diversify to make it more friendly and have more content.

  • Enhance AI Features: Develop more sophisticated algorithms to improve content personalization and explore advanced language models for tailored recommendations.

  • Build Community Features: Introduce functionalities for peer discussions, collaborative playlists, and community-driven learning experiences to foster engagement. As of now, we only have a only thing

Acknowledgments:

  • Thanks to Forest Hacks Hackathon for the inspiration and platform to build this project.
  • Special thanks to the creators of the libraries and tools we used.
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