.edYou

Want to get to the point? Customize lessons, take 100+ practice exams, all in your control.

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Inspiration

As an aspiring university Mathematics professor, Jose wants to teach his students methods to solving problems that are straight-forward. As he advances through his Undergraduate career, he takes note on how a professor teaches, recognizing what teaching styles work and which ones only confuse students. Currently studying for the GRE Mathematics Subject Test, he realized that given a certain problem, there are different methods of solving it with very specific steps. Deciding which method to use to solve the problem is purely dependent on how the question is phrased. Depending on the professor, the steps you take to answer a question can vary. This especially confuses students as they continue to more advanced courses with different professors, when different teaching styles interfere.

Jose first realized this when he finished Computer Science I (CSI), and went on to the next course, Computer Science II (CSII). At the first class of CSII, he was given a preliminary exam by the professor, and was not able to answer any of the questions that were on it. But, the students who took CSI with this professor answered them without issue. This inconsistency hindered Jose throughout the CSII course. After three years of his Undergrad, he realized his peers had the same issue.

What it does

.edYou is a completely customizable guide tailored for the courses the user is taking. For every course, different professors teach different topics. So, for every course, there is a list of every possible topic that can be taught. The user selects which topics are listed in their course syllabus, so that what they learn from .edYou will directly benefit them in their course. They are free to add more topics if they are inclined.

This app prevents this inconsistency by providing the student a direct answer to every possible case. As an example, say the user is going through a Differential Equations course. Given an n-order differential equation to solve, there are three questions you must immediately ask: Is it homogeneous? Is it exact? Is it separable? Without going off-tangent, .edYou will display the specific series of steps you must go through in order to solve it. In Mathematics, it is especially true that learning the steps of solving a problem is much more important than solving that one case. The steps you take do not change when solving two separate "homogeneous" questions. For each lesson, .edYou will provide two problems and solutions to reassure the user understands the steps they have to take.

For $0.99, the user can pay for an "exam" for that course. This exam has an algorithm that provides the user questions of the topics they selected in that course, but changes the numbers so that they are guided to remember the steps. For example, to find the x-value of the vertex of a parabola, given the general equation (ax^2+bx+c=0), you find x by the quadratic equation: x=(-b+sqrt(b^2-4ac)/2a. The algorithm would randomly insert the values for a, b, c, providing the student the same question, but over 100's of variations to help them understand the process. The exam can be customized to ask questions in only certain topics of that subject, hence it will be an accurate practice exam.

How we built it

Rather than working on a website, we found it to be more effective to have an app provide the services of .edYou. Because of the team's experience in Java, Android Studio was the perfect fit. Using our skills we learned from our classes, we were able to advance through making an application faster than other app developing programs, like Swift.

Challenges we ran into

Creating objects in Android Studio was different than creating objects in Eclipse, especially with the user interface that allowed us to drag and drop buttons, drop down menus, and text fields. The most challenging was building action listeners so that the application went from one page to the correct one. At times, one line of code would either make or break the app, which was expected. Thrice in the time

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The team as a whole was able to commit to the idea since the moment it was pitched, giving us ample time to learn how to maneuver Android Studio and still deliver the basic structure of the application.

What we learned

Learned UI/UX design with XCode and Adobe Xd; learning how to program in android, to build the structure of an app, which was not known before coming here; Learning how to lead a project and the reality of designing an application.

What's next for .edYou

The exam function has yet to be implemented. Applying the algorithm to generate exam questions from a general form of an equation, in which we can then calculate the expected answer for the student to grade themselves with. Furthermore, there should be some topics covered in a course a student is taking that are not listed under that subject. Therefore, we would need to add the topic under that subject in order to accommodate students' needs. This process is as simple as adding an element to a list. We can also expand on the user profile itself to specify the grade level, and organize lessons based on the grade level of the user.

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