Kookie

A learning platform for people with autism, connecting educators with autistic children and providing insight

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Inspiration

There is not a lot of learning resources for children with autism, and the cost of education for autistic children is $8600 higher on average. So we decided to create a learning platform to reduce this cost and help educators for more efficiently. Autistic children face problems on things we take for granted: for example recognizing an emotion from a facial expression can be hard for them. Obviously this means our students have very different needs so we decided to create a platform catered to their way of learning.

What it does

There is 2 sides to the project:

  • The student side where the autistic children learns by through a activities and games tailor suited towards teaching children with Autism. Eventually the goal is to gamify the learning experience by giving achievements and other incentives. That way we can keep the student coming back and wanting to learn more.
  • The educator side where the teacher can follow the progress of his students. We would collect a lot of data from each student (time spent on each question, how many answers did he click before choosing his final answer, or anything that might be useful in determining the progress of the child) and provide valuable insights for Teachers to utilize. Eventually we could use machine learning to help the educators pin point where each student is having a hard time, create better questions or help show any information that might not be as easy to see from simple graphs.

How we built it

The front end is a single page app made using react. It communicates with an API made built on Node.js. The API is used to register/login users, save the data from the student child and display it on the teacher side. The data is stored on a MySQL database. All the infrastructure is built using docker containers defined on different Dockerfiles and a docker-compose.yml file

Challenges we ran into

We had some trouble receiving the login cookies from the react app so to not lose to much time we decided to just pass around the user id instead of a cookie. We also ran short on time for the educator side so their the data of each student is just hard coded on the front end for the demo.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a working learning platform with login and an API that saves data. We believe we have a clean and intuitive interface that should be easy for both the educator and student to connect with. We're also proud of the idea of helping to reduce the cost and increase the quality of education for autistic children.

What we learned

We learned to collaborate and distribute the tasks all while working together towards the same goal. We also learned how to prioritize the most important issues and make necessary compromises to deliver a time-sensitive product. Lastly, we learned about the app development process from conception all the way to production.

What's next for Kookie

We see a lot of potential for Kookie, starting with simple things like adding more learning categories . We can start working with contacting educators and professionals to gain feedback and test the platform. The data we could collect can be used to further aid Autism Research, so adding Data Analytics and Machine Learning on the backend dataset could be incredibly valuable.

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