KooM

KooM, a safer zoom! Koom allows children to create virtual meeting rooms where they can connect with their peers safely under AI supervision.

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Inspiration

Michelle is a 7 year old kid attending her second year of elementary school. Unfortunately due to covid-19, she had to transition to remote learning. Michelle's mom gets very worried about her young daughter taking classes remotely as the peer to peer interactions have been a decreasing trend. Healthy peer interactions play a key role in the development of young children. However due to the coronavirus outbreak which led to the schools being closed, most of the children have been studying remotely, and despite the best efforts by teachers to provide classroom like experience. The idea of allowing kids to just go on a zoom call with their peers might leave the parents obligated to monitor any inappropriate behavior. This is why we created Koom, in a sense it is just a better zoom :)

What it does

Koom allows children to create virtual meeting rooms where they can connect with their peers by just providing their usernames, they can talk through video conferencing and exchange chat messages. During the signup process the parents can provide their phone numbers, which allows them to receive a message if the AI based monitoring system ever senses an inappropriate behavior; that could be anything from bullying to passing obscene remarks. This provides the children a safe space to interact while providing the parents the peace of mind of going about their day normally.

How we built it

Our team build this web application using ReactJS, Express, NodeJS and Firebase as our core tech stack. We further use Google NLP to achieve the sentiment result where we would notify the parents if their child experience any "bad" behavior. We also incorporated sockets.io for our in app video platform chat system where multiply participants can chat at the same time. For Authentication we used Firebase authentication.

Challenges we ran into

This project consists of many challenges and the hardest was the fight for time with the deadline. We were glad that we managed to pull through these 36 hours fighting against implementing all the features we planned to in our design document.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Working in team environment in a fast paced and challenging situation while knowing that we are working on project that makes our society a better place is our biggest accomplishment.

We are also very proud that we were able to take Koom from an idea to reality within 2 days and work cohesively like an actual startup.

We believe our app can allow children to have more meaningful and safer interactions which we are also very proud of.

What we learned

We learned more about the different technologies such as google cloud platform and twilio video programming. We also learned how to work with each other synchronously to maximize our productively. It was definitely a worth well experience that we were able to get through together as a team to successfully implement a working product.

What's next for KooM

Due to the time limitation we were not able to implement an audio sentiment analyzer in our app. In the future we look forward to using Google Clouds Speech to text and language APIs to implement that functionality.

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