Immerse

Immerse helps female refugees between 14 and 19 to get great education from local tutors based on their preferences.

Comment

Inspiration

We got inspiration from Coursera, the Rotary Service Club and Facebook. Coursera is one of the best learning resources their has ever been. Coursera is focusing on high quality and helping the community. Coursera empowers people. We want to empower people, too. The Rotary Service Club is a organization which helps people in need around the world. It is the largest service club and has a close connection to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. As a service club our application should help people no matter of how much money they have or where they came from. Facebook connects people. We want to connect the all females refugees to empower them to archive more. Facebook and their products to help people in need truly inspired us.

What it does

The app connects female refugees to tutors which are in the near of them and teach the courses the girls are interested in. By providing contact information and (offline) learning materials we help female refugees to learn mostly in every location. We also connect people to integrate them into the new social system in the fastest way possible. For people it is one of the most important desires everyone has.

How I built it

We use Twilio (SMS to server communication service) to send SMS to our server to provide informations when there is not internet connect. We build an app based on Ionic framework and Cordova plugins to get the geolocation and other device data. The app uses Facebook to ensure that the person is a female and also to get her native language. Based on the native language of the person the app is going to be translated into her native language. On the backend we are using a Python flask server to create the responses for Twilio. The responses are created using Google Translate API (for translating the text of the refugee intro english), our own natural language processing api and the Twilio python package to get the data back to Twilio.

Challenges I ran into

We ran into the problem to create the right architecture for the SMS communication. We also spend a lot of time to get to know each other, to understand the problem and to talk about the actual user. Therefore we just started hacking around 9pm. This got us into the problem that we don't had the time to finish every functionality we wanted to implement.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We build an app that communicates our ideas and we had a great learning curve. We also created our first application which automatically detects a language and can answer give an answer in the same language. As a diverse team we had a really cool time working together. We are a team from China, India, Germany and USA. We didn't know each other before and got to know each other.

What we learned

Everyone in our team learned a lot about app development, project management and communications. Every person improved their skills and had a good progress.

What's next for Immerse

We want to polish the app and make a better infrastructure for the offline communication (SMS). After that we can release the app and improve the user experience. Our goal is to help female refugees around the world to get a better and safer education.

Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_-wUoibBIDSUJW6a8dXPB8gEHhfau-b9aacNw05xY8A/edit?usp=sharing

Prototype as PDF

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_0YAHpj6dBJSm5UeWNqbmlnNHM?usp=sharing

Share this project:

Updates