Women in Continued Education (WICE)

We aim to provide access to high quality and affordable education resources that are personalized to user profiles using machine learning algorithms.

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Inspiration

From one of our members: "My mom wanted to pursue a higher education after high school, but due to her culture, her family pressured her to get married at 21 and start a family. When I asked her if she wanted to go back to school, she said she didn't know where to start." Women across the world today drop out of school early or quit their careers before they retire due to societal pressures, gender discrimination, the need for family caretakers, and low pay. Often, they feel stuck because they are out of the industry for so long and are unaware of what they need to learn. They also might lack the funds or time to pursue education.

What it does

We made a website with a survey that women can take to get tailored recommendations for various courses, boot camps, and certifications based on their availability, interest, and education level. Our system classifies the needs of each participant and emails a response that details a recommended lesson plan complete with resources from anything ranging from free code camps to college programs.

How we built it

We utilized the React framework with HTML, CSS, and Javascript to create the UI for the frontend portion of the project. We then used Python on the backend to create scripts to send the email and create results. We used Qualtrics to generate the survey and we used Palantir Foundry to create graph visualizations of test data. We then used Jupyter Notebook, Python, Pandas, Scikit Learn, and Seaborn to create machine learning models that we fed our survey data into.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled with our workflow of developing a full stack. In addition, due to our unfamiliarity with various technologies, we had a hard time getting started with React, Foundry, and making Qualtrics surveys.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a tool that can be used across the world to help women pursue further education. Additionally, we are proud of the layout of the website.

What we learned

We learned how to use React, MaterialUI, Qualtrics, and Foundry.

What's next for Women in Continuing Education (WICE)

To increase the accuracy of our model, we need more data to train it. Therefore, we need more participants to survey. In addition, we want to include the results from our Foundry analyses in the email we send to users as we value transparency and we want them to get a better understanding of their current abilities / situations. Lastly, we want to web scrape educational resources and fully implement the feedback system for ratings.

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