Guardian of Makers

Inspiration

The inspiration behind Guardian of Makers stems from the notion that maker education is more than just creating; "Maker education is more than just making – it’s learning trial and failure. Just like the real world." Based on an interview with Richard Brown from Imperial Making Outreach Lab, we identified three key importance to provide safe and personalized Maker Education for Y10-12 students with AI:

STEM EDUCATION: Providing hands-on science projects to deepen understanding beyond traditional methods like lectures.
MINDSET: Nurturing the maker mindset through education, supporting holistic growth and development.
LEARNING: Facilitating deeper learning by applying classroom knowledge to real-world problems and encouraging questioning to transfer learning to diverse situations.

What it does

Guardian of Makers fosters an environment where young makers can embrace safe trial, failure, and making as a habit for the maker mindset. It facilitates four key user flows:

Guided Making: Based on the user's Arduino wiring components, this Webapp provides explanations of those components and proposes ideas that can be built with them.
Freestyle Making: Self-initiated projects are the most creative and tutor-needed projects as they should focus on the thinking and making process.
Asking Questions: Intervention timing being ‘after school, doing homework’, this Webapp provides safe guidance and feedback at home when there’s no supervisor. Makers can ask questions during the process, like - how can I connect an Arduino Uno board and ultrasonic sensor? Guardian replies in voice. While detecting the current situation of the making process, Guardian gives proper assists for freestyle making in real-time.
Teacher Supervision: As AI isn’t flawless, and as kids are directly communicating with AI, it is important to set AI agents as teaching assistants and have them under the influence of human supervisors.
Safety Feature: The Arduino making process involves using sharp or heated irons which can cause accidents. Using safety mode, the camera captures real-time processes, and when it detects a safety issue, it gives a warning message and protects makers from accidents, leading them to develop safe making habits.

How we built it

This webapp is built with Node.js and React.js using speech-to-text (STT) and text-to-speech (TTS) of Google Cloud. Using React Webcam, the webapp captures real-time making processes and sends it to Gemini with three different prompts asking to detect safety issues, or asking for guided making, or using STT to question AI during the making process. By TTS, Gemini's output is transformed into audio guides to assist the making process seamlessly.

Challenges we ran into

Real Life Challenge: We identified a significant need within the local community for maker education for Y10-12 students, as they were facing a shortage of teachers or assistants capable of conducting maker education and mentoring (Imperial Outreach Makerspace). During interviews, teachers expressed their interest in implementing Guardian for Makers in their education programs.
Technical Challenge: Since the users of this webapp are year 10-12 students, the AI response should be easy and seamless, guiding the students' learning process rather than providing direct answers. Gemini should prompt counter questions to facilitate learning the 'making mindset' through interaction. For that, we undertook prompt engineering to enable Gemini to ask counter questions, fostering learning from failure and the thinking process, in line with the idea of supporting holistic growth and development (Dougherty, 2013). Additionally, for the safety feature, we trained Gemini on possible safety issues while using Arduino and the maker space.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Maker Education's significance in fostering inclusion in STEM is evident. Research shows that maker education increases interest in computer science and engineering, especially among underrepresented groups such as women. With Guardian of Makers, students who haven't had access to maker education can now bring their ideas to life.
The app being web-based ensures accessibility to students worldwide.

What we learned

Through the development of Guardian of Makers, we acquired valuable insights into:

Effective methods for integrating AI into educational contexts.
Designing interactions between AI and young students, positioning AI as a guide rather than merely an answer provider.
Recognizing real-life problems in the process of building AI products.

What's next for Guardian of Makers

Looking ahead, the future of Guardian of Makers involves:

Continuous refinement and improvement based on user feedback.
Expansion to reach a broader audience of young makers worldwide.
Collaboration with educators and experts to further enhance the learning experience.