Inspiration
At Northern Kentucky University, there are a good number of ELL (English Language Learning) students attending. The main source that is used by these students is the Writing Center. One of our team members, Isabel, happens to be a writing consultant at NKU. After working with so many ELL students, she wanted to make a change in the way things are happening in a tutoring session. Upon first meeting and ELL student, there is never a good way to asses his or her reading comprehension level. It is only after roughly the second session that a tutor will have an idea as to what level his or her tutee is. If there was something to help the tutors (even teachers) understand and assess, there would be a significant increase in the efficiency of a learning session.
What it does
Ello Mate is a web application that allows for ELL students (and anyone, really) to test into and improve reading comprehension levels. Students will see their progress and continue to be challenged to better their skills. Teachers and tutors, as a result, will be able to access the statistics and information necessary to better aid the students in their learning. By helping the students and helping the teachers, there is an excellent win-win scenario present.
How we built it
We built this application by banding our brains together, failing a bit (a lot, actually) at first, and finishing stronger than we thought. The applications we used were HTML, CSS, Laravel, JavaScript, and PHP.
Challenges we ran into
A challenge that we ran into was exploring Laravel from scratch by creating local databases. Another challenge we faced was trying to incorporate some form of artificial intelligence to help compute various statistical measurements.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of learning new languages and frameworks. We are also rather proud of how we executed our plan and created something that we think and sincerely hope will benefit many.
What we learned
Unfamiliar templates are difficult to customize to your needs. Database management can be challenging when using multiple tables and many entities.
What's next for ELLo Mate
The dream is rather huge for this team at ELLo Mate. Of course, we want to make this application the best platform for learning as possible. If this ever piqued the interest of schools and universities, we believe that this would be an excellent tool in the various communication barriers found between educators and students. And, while this was originally inspired by the large influx of ELL students coming to a university's writing center, this is an application that can be used by anyone who wants to improve his or her reading comprehension. Younger readers could especially benefit from this application. We want to help the literary world one paragraph at a time.
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