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Inspiration

Currently, only 34% of Indonesian population have the privilege to enter university. Meanwhile, the rest of them start seeking jobs straight after finishing high school due to financial hardship. We believe that the knowledge and skills obtained during their education may not be sufficient to perform their jobs. This will impede them from advancing in their career. Therefore, STOA is here to help them acquire necessary knowledge and skills so that they can excel in their career or make use of the opportunity to be a successful person in the future.

Besides, Indonesian students who obtain their bachelor degree are accounted for only 8.79% among all Indonesians. Those proportions may reflect the number of students who drop their degree due to financial hardship or difficulties with their majors. To tackle these issues, STOA is here to facilitate current university students with a platform that allows them to discuss and learn from their peers. This arrangement may be more efficient than recorded lectures platforms that are widely available now. Thus, we expect to help students with academic difficulties to survive in their university journey and get their degree.

What it does

STOA is a platform that can match university students with other university students. It can also match non-university students with university students. When signing up for the app, students need to tell the subject they are confident with and the subject they want to study. Afterward, the system will match them to meet and discuss something. For instance, a student who is confident with Python will be matched with their partner, who wants to learn Python while knowing the subject that the previous student wants to discuss. Then, in the discussion room, they will exchange their skills and knowledge. Furthermore, for the non-uni student, we will also provide a basic module before the discussion to ensure that they have a basic grasp of the uni subjects that they prefer. The discussion will be recorded and converted into a transcript. This transcript will be used for us to control the quality of the discussion. To develop STOA, we will rely on sponsorship from government, donations, and educational institutions.

How I built it

We will use React Native for the cross-platform mobile apps and Firebase for the database and other services such as notification.

Challenges I ran into

Matching people with the demand for the knowledge exchange is a crucial challenge for us. As our platform is still growing, it might need some time to make the inter-network effects work. Moreover, when making STOA we need to have a balance between social impacts and commercialized business aspects. This is because we want STOA to help the non-university and university students to excel in the future, while at the same time, platform development and operation also need some amount of money. Thus, we need to find a sustainable source of funding that may help us to expand the platform and its offering.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Making a functional education app in a short time that allows people to learn in a two way communication instead of a conventional lecture recording platform.

What I learned

We feel that it takes so much effort to make an impactful education platform that can holistically cover the issues mentioned in the inspiration part. We believe that making a successful platform requires multidimensional knowledge as it involves technical, business, and social aspects.

What's next for our project

For the development of our program, we will do a market survey to identify niche subjects that people want us to include in our platform. We may want to add further facilities that can improve the quality of learning on our platform such as SMS features to cover the area with bad internet coverage. In addition, if we get the sponsorship for our platform, we will allocate it 30% for our platform development and the rest is for additional scholarships to make a further social impact.

Built With

• javascript
• reactnative