Astute

A platform for children to have access to a wide array of educational live sessions using communication technology.

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Inspiration

We live in a world where not every child has the privilege of going to school. We live in a world where not every child has a supportive environment to grow up in. We wanted to eliminate those disadvantages through our app. Whether rich or poor, orphan or not, fed or not fed, we wanted to see if we would be able to provide a platform for all of them to have the equal opportunity to be educated. Our biggest goal is to provide these children what we named our app after; the ability to change their situation to their advantage by giving them an opportunity to work towards a better future.

What it does

Astute provides a platform for children to have access to a wide array of educational live sessions using communication technology. All you have to do is sign up with your existing google account in one click, and you’re done!

As you scroll through your list of available sessions, if you choose to join a session, you just need to copy the given meeting ID and paste it into the next page that navigates you into the live session.

We wanted to give children and their parents an incentive to let the student actively participate in these live sessions. As a result, for those who satisfy the number of sessions we expect them to participate, every week, will receive food stamps and gift cards. This will bring children and their families the motivation to participate in order to bring food for the family.

Astute not only provides users access to educational resources and the incentive to do so, but it also has a special feature called the emergency room. If a child needs access to emergency services, all they need to do is click on the option called the plight. This emergency room gives children the ability to talk about anything to professionals that can help them right away through one page.

How We built it

The app is built on Flutter SDK, which makes it a cross-platform environment for both Android and iOS. For the back-end data management, Firebase and Cloud Firestore have been collaboratively used, and also along with the help of Firebase, we have integrated the Google Sign-in feature with which users can get into the app without any sort of pre-sign up required. Google Cloud Platform services, namely Cloud Speech to Text, Google Maps API, Google Translate, and DialogFlow have been used for speech conversion, live maps, translation, and chatbot. Using all these GCP services in a single project makes the integration of Flutter and GCP much more effective and powerful. We have used the Agora RTM SDK for the live class(video calling) functionality, which is a highly secured cloud video calling platform. For prototyping the entire app, we have used Figma and Adobe Illustrator for UI/UX design handling.

Challenges we ran into

Configuring Agora for the first time was really challenging, especially granting various permissions and configuring the AgoraRTCEngine, and since it was highly secured, we had to develop the RTCEngine following all sorts of security restrictions and finally making the app highly secured with a single key for the viewer and the presenter. Also, we faced issues with the Google Translator, as it was only translating and printing dynamically onto the console, inside of having it to set the state on the application itself. So, all these challenges were quite time-consuming and hence we had to rush with our app, but we finally did ace it and hit the time constraints without fail.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our usage of food stamps/gift cards to provide disadvantaged children incentives to study while also helping their family. And I also definitely love the emergency room feature because they provide children an easy way to get access to all their emergency contacts/locations when in need of help. ~Sanjana

Knowing the fact that education is accessible to everyone, even the ones that are deprived of it, really brings in a satisfying appeal, especially when it's free of cost. Using the recent trends technology to make this possible whilst being a part of it, makes me proud. ~Amey

What we learned

As a team, we collaboratively worked together to make this project a success and as a result, we have improved our team-building skills, and excellent communication among the teammates has been proved to be fruitful. We learned new UI/UX methodologies like Figma and GCP services with its various APIs(Cloud to Speech, Maps and Translate) and SDK support by its powerful integration within various cross-platform development services like Flutter and React. We have also used Dialog Flow for chatbot and Agora RTM SDK which was something new for us to use. Along with this, we also had a great time developing the app.

What's next for Astute

Addition of more subjects and in collaboration with various companies, we intend to come up with various institutions especially for the disabled ones, enabling a better methodology for everyone. Using AI/ML for better enhancement in education during classes to remind you about your classes with a voice assistant and using better Natural Language Toolkit analysis for a better bot understanding.

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