Guavas STEM

Inspiration

It all happened during my vacation in my home country of Pakistan. Walking through the slums of the cities like Lahore and Karachi, watching children though, not having a proper roof above their head, but still running around, playing with each other and trying as hard as they can to learn in underfunded schools with a bright spark in their eyes and a big smile on their faces. It was there and then where I decided that I will find a way to at least try and reduce the major education gap between the higher income class and the low class in my home country by taking advantage of my own privilege by gathering knowledge from all domains to the best of my abilities. Later, to use that knowledge to come back and try to bridge that same gap. Though, I did not quite exactly know how to. That is when, spending a year in the US trying to study as hard as possible and later stumbling upon a TikTok by @adi.adara on Jumpstart! And voila, we are here. The very first thing that came into my mind was to keep in my mind the huge population on Earth that does not know how to speak English plus the COVID-19 pandemic that has greatly impacted low class children due to their financial constraints of affording online tutors, and their underfunded schools not being able to handle and adjust to online learning. Now, with that in mind, just because a lot of them do not know how to speak English shouldn't mean they should be barred from learning about glorious STEM fields. There, I found a way to ideate introductory subjects in Biology in Urdu and Spanish as my Minimum Viable Product and designing it with my Co-Founders using Glide and figuring out product features in our documentation.

What it does

Introductory concepts with visuals in Biology in Urdu and Spanish with a sleek and simple UI that helps youth who do not know how to speak English learn concepts in STEM fields. COVID-19 awareness in both languages to help stop the spread of the virus and quicken the path to safer way of students being educated through physical school.

How I built it

Using Glide, a mind map to think about all the product features, documentation of product features with the help of my amazing Co-Founders.

Challenges I ran into

Many of the various challenges I ran into were figuring out what my MVP would be, how would I design my pitch and how to assign roles for my Co-Founders to contribute together efficiently. With time all those challenges slowly started to reduce as a problem and eventually seized to exist. A few other challenges included the adjustment in working for the first time with my team to develop a project, which later actually helped us be a better team after solving them.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Oh boy, where should I start. I am really just so proud for myself and my team for us to be sticking through all day and morning to work on this glorious project and learning from each individual problems we faced that benefited us collectively. We all have learnt a lot in design thinking, building a product, what features to put, designing a proper MVP and how to identify a need etc. I am proud of my fellow Co-Founders and I to be showing the initiative for the first time participating in JumpStart.

What I learned

We, the team, have learnt the power of putting our brainpower together to identify, solve and try to nullify a problem. We have increased our levels of persistence on tackling problems. We have learnt to not just visualize a solution but to now implement it in real-time using the many resources available on the internet. We have learnt how to use Glide, video editing software and various others that will, in the future, help us in our future endeavors.

What's next for Guavas STEM

The next journey for Guavas STEM is to now implement our MVP in a programming language to later publish it on the play store and app store, later advertising it to the communities we are targeting to. Gauging the level of success in our venture we will then update the app with support for many other languages with countries known to have a high level of illiteracy and implement a text-to-speech feature for our courses to help students with reading disorders and various special needs. We aim to always put the user first, and working our way into finding better and more efficient solutions for them and expanding our user reach with more support.

Built With

• doc
• glide