EduLab

Inspiration

We were inspired by learning games such as Kahoot that motivate students to stay in school as well as text reminder apps.

What it does

Our team’s project attempts to solve the difficult issue of keeping children, especially those underrepresented minority groups, involved in their schooling. Many children lose passion for learning, which spirals into issues later on. This is achieved through a website that features an AI chat bot which listen to your experiences at school, responding in an articulated way which encourages and motivates students. In addition, users can opt into a motivational messaging system to provide ongoing support through the users mobile device.

How we built it

We built our project using Google Cloud, Twilio, Django and Bootstrap. Google Cloud was used to train and host our AI chatbot that helps motivate children to stay in school. Google Cloud was also used to schedule a Google Cloud function that uses Firestore to send motivational morning texts to our users. Users of our website can interact with the chatbot, or enroll themselves into these morning texts.

Challenges we ran into

Our greatest challenges came when trying to integrate all of our features together. We developed multiple AI prototypes and worked hard to continue retraining the AI bot to get satisfactory results during testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our work building a framework to host our AI bot and Twilio messaging system. Most of our team members are new to AI so we are proud of our learning experience with the Google Cloud AI bot and our work training and testing the model. We are also very excited about this project we’ve created, as all of us are very passionate about it.

What we learned

We learned about the world of AI and as well as integration techniques used during web development. We delved deep into both Google Cloud and Twilio to explore their features and create integrations for our website.

What's next for EduLab

EduLab will next support game integration so that students can find learning outlets in gaming as well as the motivation that they need. We also hope to add a “Person of the Day'' feature to our home page where we show off people of all different backgrounds to increase representation. We’re going to implement our Dialogflow chatbot over Twilio, such that users could talk with our chatbot directly over text, and respond to our daily messages directly. And finally, in general, we plan on improving the dialogue and conversation flow of our chatbot.

Built With

• bootstrap
• django
• firestore
• google-cloud
• twilio