KidU

An Early Childhood Education Focused App that Aims to improve Classroom Engagement in Remote Learnings Youngest Workers

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Inspiration

KidU is an early childhood remote learning tool that works to increase classroom engagement among the youngest virtual workers. Since shifting to a distanced learning format, parents of elementary school aged children have been forced to juggle their roles as parents, employees, and classroom tech support.

Teachers have also struggled immensely due to a variety of threats posed to the online learning format, compromises in availability are happening via Ransomware and Denial of Service attack, while the integrity of lectures is threatened with so-called "Zoom-bombing" from strangers and disruptive students causing chaos in the online classroom. This has resulted in many teachers severely locking down their virtual classrooms, limiting functionality and impeding in the accurate assessment of student engagement.

Additionally, very young children aren’t always capable of doing things required of the virtual learning environment (knowing how to raise their hand, turning on the camera/microphone, screen sharing), which leads to significant parental intervention. The simplistic and engaging, kid-friendly user interface provides a more inviting classroom experience as opposed to the sterile and minimalist UI's used by many web-conferencing apps.

What it does

KidU is a completely independent teacher guided application that looks to provide features to complement the remote conferencing features found in the teleconferencing applications used by schools systems. Similar to the "clicker" remotes utilized in large lecture halls, KidU is a polling application with a real-time response feed. Teachers can populate the app with questions that align to their lesson plan ahead of the actual class time, or conduct on-the-fly polling for questions they think of mid-lecture. When students are polled, teachers can view the results for every student in real time, as well as receive and view completed reports on individual students through the teacher UI. The purpose of KidU is not to provide a platform in which Quizzes and Grading is done on, but rather a live response tool used to assess classroom engagement.

How we built it

We built this webapp using Vue! Our Vue front end handles all of the interactions between the teacher and students. Our front end also handles submitting information (such as student answers) and posting quizzes to the database. Student and Teacher information is stored in Firebase's Firestore, and quizzes are stored in Firebase's Realtime Database.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a challenge of one of teammates' laptop not booting up, and another teammate's laptop not charging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our concept; we are glad we are able to make a product that can help people meet the challenges faced during COVID-19 and beyond.

Additionally, while working on this project, at least 3+ articles have come out regarding how stressful the online format has been for parents of elementary school aged children, as they're forced to play the role of tech support and classroom assistant to their children while they also handle their own work-from-home duties. This clearly identifies a need for a solution to address these concerns, and KidU seems like it could be the perfect solution.

What's next for KidU

We hope to add more functionality like being able to create classrooms easily and join with an invite link (right now it's manual :(, so automating that with Firebase functions would be amazing!). Further down the road, we'd like to be able to sign into Zoom, Webex, etc. through our portal to not have to deal with more passwords (or even better, integrate the clients into the classroom itself).

We have hopes of implementing notifications that teachers can push out to students that serve as "taps on the shoulder" as a reminder for them to stay engaged and follow along with the material, as well as notifications students can send to their teacher to let them know if they need additional assistance. There's also plans for ADA related functionalities like speech-to-text input for answers.

There are some compliance related concerns that will need to be addressed prior to production with regards to KidU being an application that collects data on children. Therefore to be fully compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), we need to implement a notice and form that obtains the verifiable consent of parents before collecting any data.

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