Team SYS (089)

Title
Table of Contents
[1] Problem
Problem Statement
Specifications of Problem
[2] Solution
Our Solution
Recorded Lessons
Discussion Boards
Telegram Study Groups
External enrichment course suggestions
Architecture
Rationale for Architecture

Inspiration

To combat the changing circumstances of our learning ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, universities across Singapore have taken an approach of home-based learning (HBL) ahead of time to protect the well-being of its students and to ease the spread of the virus by limiting on-site activities. As a result, it is often common to see your everyday standard university student nowadays to participate in online classes and lectures in lieu of on-site lectures and attendance. However, we have noted (and from ourselves, too!) that students can find it harder to concentrate in a virtual environment for their learning and experience, and may find themselves in a difficult situation booking consultations with their professors, or even having a social event with their own friends.

From the use of qualitative analyses on our end, we have established that these problems can be sorted down mainly to educational needs, albeit to social needs as well to a smaller degree. Through our diverse expertise and approach, our team has pondered on the feasibility of making educational content easier to access and open to university students, while leveraging on the effectiveness on the growing capabilities of technology and messaging platforms to formulate a solution that can not only satisfy their educational needs, but to also foster a virtual community within the school and to go beyond than being separated at our own homes.

What it does

Our solution encompasses on the core features of empowering students to a wide variety and array of resources for them to learn and understand from; building specific communities which share similar academic majors or modules to help students with one another on not only on their academic problems, but also by fostering a healthy discussion with social virtual study groups.

As our team recognizes the impact of user retention in encouraging scalability and sustainability within our solution, we have added features and enhanced our back-end infrastructure with cloud computing so as to ensure the best user experience to the students.

How we built it

Driven by our prior experiences and motivations, our team translated our ideation into an actual Telegram bot prototype using Python and Telegram (python-telegram-bot). Throughout the developmental phase, our front-end was established with the Telegram API, AWS CloudFront and Amazon API Gateway for the security aspects and connection to our back-end, which is powered further with Python programming in numerous AWS services such as Lambda (serverless functions), S3 (storage) and CloudWatch (monitoring) to build a holistic prototype.

Challenges we ran into

There were several limitations with Telegram Bot API as it is not versatile enough to handle higher level operations and so. We also have to deal with the time crunch, which meant that we have to manage our expectations and resources properly so that we can deliver the final prototype and product in a timely fashion.

While some of our team members had their shares of hackathons, in truth – we were a mixed batch of individuals from different expertises ranging from Chemistry to Computer Science with different strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, as each of us have our own interpretations of the whole ideation of the project, this means that there will be times where we had to effectively communicate with one another in a time crunch to get features and servers online, all while compensating each other for our different aptitudes and strengths in this hackathon.

Furthermore, we recognized that our solution must also be cost-effective and sustainable, as it can be computationally and economically unfeasible to sustain such a framework in the long run. Video links were favoured over transmitting colossal amounts of data (in lecture videos) over to the end-user and the entire experience should be seamless and flowing where necessary. The time crunch of only 24 hours in this hackathon has also caused us to do snap evaluations in the architecture of our solution so that the product can be delivered before the expected deadline.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In truth, it came to us as a surprise that we have managed to complete our ideation and developmental cycle, along with our presentation and editing, all within a span of 12 hours within our expectations. Our team was actually anticipating for us to stay overnight till the morning to complete this whole project, but thankfully, this is an accomplishment in which all of us can finally sleep soundly in. The short timeframe of this hackathon has also brought us in a near-constant form of online communication with one another, and we were able to research, ideate, design and program our solution into reality along with our video and slides deck.

What we learned

Not only have we improved on our programming knowledge and experience, but we have also learnt about the applicability of making use of what we have learnt to create a better impact to our community and to a larger impact, to our society. To be able to understand the importance of user experience is paramount; as our team has realized it to be a key factor in maintaining the continued use of our solution for their daily educational and social needs whilst in university. Our team were also given an eye-opening opportunity to learn from the various mentors from different industries such as NUS, Micron and Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT), as they have provided meaningful insights and experiences during the hackathon which has fundamentally shaped our thinkings towards the industry.

What's next for EduSYS

Team SYS is confident in bringing EduSYS into greater heights and there are numerous opportunities for us to turn our solutions into reality. Our different skillsets and strengths, coupled with our vast interdisciplinary knowledge, has provided us with a unique perspective to a problem – realizing that the building of a holistic and full product takes more than just programming and knowledge in computer science. We are certain that in the near future, continued development will progress on for EduSYS which will bring about a greater impact to students across various backgrounds and levels in Singapore.