Universal Academy

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  Language selection menu for Petunia (chatbot)

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  Petunia helping user navigate site

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  Demonstration of user using the chat for better grammar feature

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  Petunia guiding user to where our English lesson plan can be found

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  Our website, main page

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  The subjects we currently offer on our site and the languages we offer them in

Our inspiration:

The inspiration for our project came from our own background. Most of us are first generation students and immigrants so we understand first hand how hard it is to learn something when you don't really understand English. Coupled with the fact that most educational websites that are meant to help students are geared towards English users only. The language barrier can be a huge obstacle for students to learn properly, which in turn affects students' learning foundation causing more issues down the road. Our project is based off of these struggles in language and education.

What it does:

We decided to create an educational website that provides multilingual educational resources. Having different languages for the same topic allow students to understand the topic better, because it eliminates the need for them to fully understand English in order to get the help they need. Students can also use our chatbot, Petunia, to help them navigate the site. Petunia also helps students improve their spelling and grammar through the "chat for better grammar" feature. We decided to add this feature because immigrant students do not always have the opportunity to practice their writing and have someone correct it for them. Therefore, it would be nice to let students chat with Petunia and have her correct their grammar whenever they want to practice.

How we built it:

We used Google sites to build the foundation of our project and IBM Watson Assistant to build our chatbot Petunia.

Challenges we ran into:

Since we have very little coding experience, finding a way to carry out our solution was the biggest challenge we ran into. Additionally, while we were doing research we noticed a lack of lesson plans in other languages, which made us more certain that there is a need for a multilingual educational website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

Our biggest accomplishments are definitely being able to build our website and Petunia (chatbot) with the little experience and time that we have.

What we learned:

We learned how to make a basic website using Google site, how to make a chatbot using IBM Watson Assistant, and most importantly we learned how to collaborate as a team.

What's next for Universal Academy:

We would like to create a quiz app for assessment so we know what to recommend to students, hold virtual classes, create more material in different languages, and expand Petunia’s (chatbot) capabilities.

Built With

• google-site
• ibm-watson