Hackerupt was a hackathon that was aimed at High School students which consisted of first year engineering students, 11th and 12th grade students. The theme of this hackathon was Education, with the focus being on finding ways to disrupt the current education practices. The hack was for 12 hours and was too short to get anything done. The project we wanted to build was called Nitro, a real time student/teacher interface program that consisted of giving an Android app to the students present on the lecture and asking them to live select answers in an MCQ when presented with them on screen. This hack was conducted in WorkBench Projects, MG Road during August, 2015.
The analytics from the app could be used to study the individual child's ability to learn and interest in key topics, based on which the further courses could be tweaked to ensure maximum efficiency in teaching the students. The real advantage of the app was to facilitate a real time feedback loop that kept constantly improving the base lecture that the teacher was responsible to design.
The stack consisted of 3 parts, we built a small 433 MHz transmitter with 4 push buttons one for each of the answers in the mcq, which was a cost effective solution to deployment in case Mobile phones were not easily accessible in remote locations. There was also an android app in the stack that emulated the 4 answers and allowed students to pick one based on the question shown on screen. The server consisted of an MEAN stack with an api that allowed you to setup questions, review progress of the entire subject versus an individual child's score pertaining to that particular subject, among other analytics.
The light around this application is that everything was stored on the cloud, questions once uploaded in the application could be accessed and modified by teachers who felt the need to improve/correct the given question set. Future plans could include building a system around the question submission process, and include reviews for the best question set to train students with, overtime if this gets adopted we will have aggregated the best and most efficient tool to raise question sets as far as day to day teaching is concerned, and the best part is that there will be uniformity in teaching the students with these said question sets. This gives us the advantage to move from locally and geographically restricted classrooms to more e-learning based applications. Suppose a kid is on leave and does not attend the classes, he can log into his mobile and continue attending the lecture/ answer questions that were given to him by the teacher, and his progress would not go unaccounted.
Also by bringing the barrier of entry down to nothing but a phone seemed very straight forward, the mobile connects us directly to the information grid and sooner or later, a hefty portion of learning would mostly be carried out online and at your own pace, so this seemed to us like a worthy venture.
We left empty handed at this hack too, because we were overambitious in our attempt to build a fully thought out product but wasted too much time on the specifics, we set out to learn how to build a minimal viable product and hard code specifics at this hack.
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