InteractU

Schools and Colleges Team #2

Overview

Students’ educational development was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. Arizona State University reported that of fifteen hundred students surveyed, half of them showed a decrease in academic performance and study hours due to the pandemic. Every member of our team also wished that their remote learning experience was more engaging. As a result, our team came up with InteractU.

InteractU is a computer application that is a perfect complement to video call services like Zoom. Our product ensures that students remain engaged and are learning throughout the entire online class.

Below you can find details to understand the product we are selling.

Team Members

Joe Deiser (Project Manager, Senior Political Science and Spanish @ Wabash College) Joe was responsible for scheduling all internal and external meetings. He created a Trello board and ran weekly team meetings. Joe also worked with Thomas to complete the Go Team deliverables. Finally, he worked with the rest of the team to complete the presentation.

Tom Xiong (Marketing, Junior Business @ IU Bloomington) Tom Xiong is a rising junior majoring in Finance at Indiana University. He entered the Techpoint SOS Challenge because he felt that remote learning had to be improved. During the challenge, Tom worked with Joe on the business side of the product.

Andrew Paxson (Pro Squad leader, Senior Physics and Computer Science @ Valparaiso University) Andrew Paxson is a rising senior majoring in both Physics and Computer Science. He was responsible for the Pro Squad's oversight, including the maintenance of all code, distributing tasks to other members of the pro squad, and maintaining a Github repository in which all code is to be uploaded.

Rohini Malpe(UX Designer, MS in HCI/d at Indiana University, Bloomington) Rohini is a second year Master’s student in the Human Computer Interaction Design program at IU. She worked in the Pro Squad towards helping build the product as a coder and designer.

Xianying Chen (Software Development, Junior Computer Science and Data Science @ Rose-Hulman) Xianying Chen is a rising junior majoring in computer science and data science at Rose-Hulman. Xianying worked with the pro team on the application development side of the product, including creating several features and graphics.

Ketu Sayers (Software development, Mechanical Engineer, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology) Ketu is a rising Junior with a major in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Economics. Ketu acted largely as a team polyglot, performing whatever role(s) best fit the team needs at any time.

How did you decide on this customer segment, problem, and solution?

We worked with our Coaches to identify three types of customers we could talk to about this problem. We surveyed students and professors and interviewed the Director of IT Services at Wabash College, Brad Weaver. In those interviews, we learned four key things:

Students want more engagement and social interaction with online learning
Professors need new ways to receive feedback with remote learning
4/5 students met on Zoom for their online classes
Administrators and professors learn about new technologies through higher education publications and associations

We decided to design a new product that addresses the needs of students and professors in a COVID-19 world. Our product makes lectures more interactive and also creates opportunities for students to socialize with one another. We also developed a marketing strategy that would focus on reaching professors and administrators through those higher education publications. We also researched current forms of remote learning to compare them to our idea.

How did your team build and iterate on the solution? The first step was to come up with a realistic end goal that could be accomplished within five weeks. We knew from the beginning that all of the features that we wanted to include could not be done within the allotted time frame, so deciding which features were to be added, and which to leave out was essential for making the best possible product. After researching possible technologies, we decided it was best to use HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

Within the first three weeks, we had the keys features up and running, as well as some debugging of the code. These were the video uploader, player, and comment system. Creating these features was probably the most challenging part as if this did not work, then the core of the project was sure to fail. One of the critical decisions we had to make here was that our game component could not realistically be created due to time constraints and feasibility.

In the fourth and fifth week, we used this time to create several additional, nonessential features. Features that we wanted to include, but either did not perform to their highest functionality or were merely there to convey a function to add. Also, this time was used to connect all the pages into one coherent form, to make it look like a real product and not a bunch of files.

Key Metrics

50 students surveyed 3 professors surveyed 1 Director of IT Services interviewed

Key Tools, Libraries, and Frameworks

Github HTML & HTML Bootstrap CSS JavaScript PHP MySQL

Web application

HTML - We chose HTML because is it easy to learn, there are a ton of helpful guides, and it is a stable and reliable scripting language
CSS -- CSS was used in conjunction with HTML for easy design of the webpages. JavaScript - JavaScript was used in conjunction with HTMl for functionality purposes.
PHP- We used PHP for the back-end database management, as not only is it simple to use, but it is extremely robust. MySQL- We used MySQL for the actual database, because it is the most common form of database and is extremely useful and reliable, especially when it only is used via localhost.

If you had another 5 weeks to work on this, what would you do next?

We would conduct more user testing as we only had time to test our finished product amongst ourselves.
We would find out how effective social media campaigns are for education apps.
Try to get a more accurate price for our product.
We would look into ways to integrate our app with Zoom.