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Capstone Week 1 & 2
We have decided to take a break from the ed-tech space. More specifically, the group is fatigued and grinding harder in that space is not helping. Thus, we are exploring outwards for fresh ideas and perspectives while we are still in the early phases.
Breakfast Delivery
Target companies and deliver breakfast. Our algorithm will estimate and ensure the costs of delivery is minimised.
However, this business seems like something that will turn into a logisitical nightmare instead as the tech portion is too small of the business.
Wholesale Materials Ordering
The current way to buy materials is to go down to Artfriend (for plastics) or metal shops and source it there. However, there is no central marketplace for such things. Most of these shops operate through hotlines and are not fully digitised.
A platform could be established that takes in such orders and does the full middle man processing (order,payment,delivery). However, such a business might require a large customer base to stay afloat. Honestbee could do that because groceries is a mainstay, not a hobby.
AI Customer Service
Chatbots are the trend currently for improving customer service. We are looking into this area for possible innovations.
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2016: The end of the road
Throughout our testing, it was clear that the impact of the tool in class was minimal and insignificant. It was unable to facilitate dicussion. The problem did not seem as big as initially thought to be.
Teachers were unable to switch between tools in class and the extra attention required meant that it will be quickly forgotten.
On hindsight, what could have been better:
Surveying the problem better instead of surveying the effectiveness of the solution.
Conducting cheaper and smaller tests earlier and faster.
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20/11: external meeting with Dr Ashley
Today, 2 of us went for a meeting with Dr Ashley.
Highlights
We should look into the pedagogy team in SUTD and talk to them about the school's pedagogy and direction.
Our solution focuses on back channel learning
There is a broad spectrum of teaching styles. We should find a range that we want to focus on.
Have both qualitative and quantitative data for support.
We could take one step back and re-look at the problems again
We could take half step back and see what competitors offer and make something better
Education industry is slow because its risk-adverse and the effects are hard to see.
Pigeonhole was not very good due to the need for administration. People often expect their questions to appear on screen fast, not to wait for it to be moderated.
Examples of ed-tech off his head is teamie.
LMS systems are not worth the money. Mostly serves as an expensive dropbox
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13/11: Students interview
Today we did some interview for students as part of our indiegogo's video campaign. In restrospect, we realised we did not do any serious interviewing on the part of students about our product.
These interviews are done without them trying the product first.
The question we asked was: What do you do when you have questions during lesson?
Wong I will wait until the end of the lesson to approach the teacher. Because I don't really want to disrupt the class and bring the whole lesson to a standstill just for my question.
Enyan I write it down then after lesson I go to the teacher. Because personally I'm shy. Don't have the courage to put up my hands. Most of the times I don't know what I don't know. I will not ask if I am not sure that the question is something that everyone also has.
Marcus I will write down the questions on a piece of paper, because I do not want to disrupt the class. I am not very confident in raising my hands and just asking questions.
Hazel I ask my friends if they understand. Otherwise I google and try to understand myself. I don't really like to disrupt the lesson. I feel that I should take the learning as my own responsibility instead of asking the teacher everything.
HaoQin I will note down what I don't understand and google after class.
We asked them after the interview if they would ask in-class anonymously if given a chance, their answer was generally negative. They prefer asking 1-on-1.
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11/11: Prof Meetup
We now have slides displayed in our app with a comments box for each slide. We think that this will attract students to stay on our app and use it to ask questions as it is now integrated into the learning process. We met up with 3 profs to discuss this improvement.
Prof Simon Lui:
Prof has been using a lot of ed tech tools and does not see any significant unique features in our prototype.
He emphasizes UX as a key feature in adoption, stating that it "should be usable by a 60 year old physics teacher".
He thinks that the winning edge is not in features but will be in the ease of use, which will lead to ease of adoption.
Prof Chee Huei:
Uses Windows Surface to annotate on his slides.
Has tried Ink2Go, which allows for annotation on any screen.
Thinks that an overview of questions will be useful.
Prof MeiHui:
Has a tendency to interact with students at the front only.
Thinks that the tool is not very useful in class as she does not want to read the questions in class while teaching.
Thinks that raising hands is the most effective way of asking questions.
Moving
We have asked all the profs if they will try out our system in class. We will be liaising with them to test it out and to see the results for ourselves. We want to see if including the slides itself in the system will encourage questions in the system itself.
Hypothesis
Slides in the platform will encourage students to use the system to ask.
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21/10: Prof Meetup
We met up with Prof Sun Jun and Prof Binder.
Prof Binder:
Asked him if we could use our prototype in his class
He was willing but not convinced of the uses of our product.
Prof did not expect students to understand in class and thus, live feedback is not necessary.
We will try to use it in 2 of his classes on Thurs.
Prof Sun Jun:
Prof was enthusiastic about the dream.
Believes in active learning and thinks that this product will contribute to it
Willing to test out product in future.
Testing in Prof Binder's class
Prof introduced it to students in class as a student project
We observed that almost no one looked at the product in the first class.
However, we received quite a bit of response in the 2nd class
This might be due to the morning class being very small and not many people were there when the tool was introduced.
Personally, we realised that we did not know which checkpoints to click when we did not understand
Moving forward
The app feels very 'outside' of class and thus people do not refer to it.
We should consider integrating slides into the app to get more people to look at it.
The feedback from our current prototype feels very lacking.
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08/10: Prof Meetup
We met up with Prof Oka and Prof Costas on Thurs and Friday respectively. This was after the pitch and we also had a primitive version of our product that could be tested.
Prof Costas:
We presented the prototype and discussed about the addition of slides to the product.
He was asking for a 2-tiered checkpoints systems but acknowledged that with 2 tiers, the first tier would no provide any useful information.
Thus, with a checkpoints system, profs will need to create a lot of checkpoints to gather valuable information
Integration with slides would give the prof more info while reducing number of checkpoints
Moving on
The inclusion of a slides preview system that integrates into our product seems like an necessity to provide more valuable information. This would allow students to highlight parts of the slide and comment on it.
Prof Oka, after discussions, has agreed to be our academic mentor as of now.
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14/10: VC Pitching
We had our actual pitch on 14th Oct.
We could consider making different templates for different pedagogies.
VCs were generally positive.
We found SlideKlowd and MeetingPulse as a similar products
SlideKlowd was the closest as it is working in the edtech sector too.
There was nothing much that happened during Pitching.
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07/10: Pitch Dry Run
We had our pitching dry run on Wednesday afternoon. It was not really a dry run but more of a lead up since the same people will be coming in as the judges for the actual pitch next wednesday.
Notes
We presented an MVP but it does not seem to support our pitch much. Instead, it gave an impression that the product was easily copiable.
The Product page was listing our MVP instead of our end product.
We overshot the time by a min or so.
Comments
Michael suggested looking into positive feedback loops. For example, having students giving a thumbs up for good slides as motivation for teachers
We need to clearly define our problem.
Aftermath
We had a discussion about our product and realised that we have been holing ourselves up in our MVP idea and did not expand on it. We had a discussion and we generated an idea that we think could be a sellable version that has a higher barrier of entry.
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4/10: Updates on MVP
We met Prof Tee Hui on thursday to further validate our idea. He mentioned that:
Current classroom for EPD classes makes it difficult for students to see projections, and therefore he requires streaming of slides to laptops
He wanted to use Slidedog but school laptops prevent installation of external softwares
Finds the need to log in for Learning Catalytics as a hassle
In general, he was more concerned about homework submission and wanted an online solution for sutdents to complete and submit their work
He feels that we should observe classes from a Teaching Assistant POV to really understand the problem
Basic MVP UI
Login Page
Class creation
Teacher Dashboard
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29/09: Meeting with Profs
We arranged a meeting with Prof Chee Huei who taught us Physics in our first year. We heard he was using SplashTop in class and thought that he would be a likely candidate that would adopt our product.
Prof Chee Huei:
There might be abuse of system by pranksters.
He also thinks that typing questions in class is distracting.
Learning Catalytics are used in first year as the team was big enough to split the work.
Pillar years do not use LC as teachers do not have time to input questions
There is a learning curve in using / inputting questions in LC
Using LC is not that hard.
Trying out SplashTop as a way to reach out to students sitting at the back
Teacher setup time is an important consideration in utilising elearning tools
LC promotes the concept of Just in Time learning and teaching.
5/10 in adoption of our tool. Partly due to his familiarity with LC.
Interested in trying Google Classroom
Logo
We also asked our friend Shafie to help us design a logo for our company! We will be putting it up once we confirm a design.
Mockup
Jiahao is busy doing up a more defined version of the mockup using basic images. Hopefully, this would be usable to present to Profs that we will be meeting later this week.
Code
Basic room creation functionality is done with the ability to add checkpoints. Basic Travis integration is done.
TL;DR
Met Prof Chee Huei for more validation. Got a logo and mockup going. Code framework is also starting up.
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23/09: Meeting Wee Boon and Ben Tan
Today we met Wee Boon, Assistant Manager of the Office of Education, to learn more about how the school evaluate educational tools for procurement.
From what we gathered:
Professor Pey Kin Leong, Associate Provost, makes the final decision
The school always makes sure that the tools must fit the pedagogy
Professional level of support must be available, as well as robust features for large-scale usage.
Learning catalytics, our current question polling tool, costs $20/student/year
He also mentioned some of the criteria they look out for include:
Project methodology/implementation
Ease of use
Cost effectiveness
Professors recommendation / Feedback
Research paper to prove effectiveness / necessity of tool
We told him about the problem we are trying to solve and our proposed solution, but the implicit opinion we get from him seems to be that:
Learning Catalytics was bought to solve such issues
It should be the responsibility of the teachers to make lessons engaging and interactive, so that students will ask questions willingly.
He did mention that professors and students would understand the problem better than him, and encouraged us to validate the solution in classes.
Meeting Benjamin
We also arranged for a meet-up with Benjamin Tan, an ESD student, to introduce to him our project, in hopes of recruiting him into the team as the cross-pillar member of Entrepreneurship Capstone. We hope to use his expertise in statistical mathematics to hopefully create useful analytical features from data that we can record from Entenna. We had a good talk but he needed some time to consider. He got back to us in the end and decided to join our team. Hooray!
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22/09: Meeting with Profs
We went down to ISTD office and walked around looking for profs with some free time to pitch to them. We found 3 and had a good discussion with them regarding their thoughts on the issue of student feedback and what they though of our product.
Prof Man:
Prof likes to tend to the minority if he can identify them.
LC is too much trouble to set up
Product might be distracting if everyone is using phone
Prof Costa:
Asking students to work out questions in class takes very long; Cannot be a main way of gathering feedback
Students should not post their own questionsas he feels it will stop the student from listening to class
Teacher will set up checkpoints (like topics)
Student will select the checkpoint they do not understand when they click button
Not sure if everyone should see clicks (The HUD display on screen)
Prof Oka:
LC is troublesome (bad UI)
Socrative is better but still requires set up time
Piazza is useful but only if big class (requires volume)
Raised the clicker system in NTU
Panic button useful for initial feedback but wishes for more specific questions
Likes the idea that panic button presses will be tagged to specific slide so that Prof can know which part is unclear
Thinks that the inaccuracy of slide tagging is minor.
Moving on
The profs generally agreed that the product has potential and we should move on with a initial prototype. Our plan now is to prototype a basic panic button with checkpoint tags. Students will be able to indicate the checkpoint that they do not understand but cannot enter their questions.
Elaboration
It seems that education tools suffer from bad UI. Discussion based tools such as Piazza requires a large volume to gain traction within the course. From our personal experience, we also noticed that Piazza worked in a cohort level course (Digital World of ~300 students) but failed to be utilized effectively in ISTD courses (CSE / ProbStats of 40+ students)
TL;DR
Went to hunt profs for discussion and pitch. General feedback that problem exists and product has potential. Moving onto Prototype v0.1.
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Entre Workshop
Entre Workshop
18/09 - 20/09
The four of us went for Entrepreneur workshop over the weekend. In the workshop, we re-evaluated our approach towards the module.
Initially, we thought we had a problem and a nice solution. However, in the workshop, we had a second look at our solution and realised that we had been approaching the entire thing the wrong way. We had a solution, then fitted a problem to it.
After a day of discussion, we found that we had a spectrum of problems that we could target. The main problem generally is professors do not receive enough feedback from students. However, there are many reasons why students did not raise their questions.
Students do not wish to slow down / interrupt the lecture
Students are afraid of being seen as stupid / slow
Students are afraid that he/she is the only one with the question
Students do not understand but do not have question to ask yet
Quora: Why dont college students ask questions in class
Our solution was to create a live feedback system that allows professors to read the 'mood' of the class through a HUD-like display that overlays the presentation. This system is anonymous and anyone can feedback at any point of time.
To start off, professor setup a room and ask students to join in through their computers or phones. They do not need to login as the system is anonymous. The professor starts his lesson as usual with the web app running in the background. At any time, if the student feels unsure, he can hit the panic button on his phone or computer screen. When a certain percentage of panic buttons have been fired, the HUD display will alert the prof to the state of the class.
Our persona for our product was based off one of our professors who during class, always seeked the class feedback but was met with slience. We think that he will welcome a tool that helps to absolve the awkward slience and lead to a more engaging environment.
We also had a look at the business aspect of our product. The education industry is a quirky market as products are used by profs and students but business decisions lie with the administrators. Thus, we had a issue of who do we sell the product to. Most education tools online pitch their products at the administrator, highlighting many features that help to reduce prof setup time. However, our initial talks with our prof shows that the user experience of such tools are quite bad and not usable.
At the end of the workshop, we had plans to meet our persona to find out more and pitch our product, a meeting setup with the Office of Education to learn more about the school's decision in purchasing education tools.
TL;DR
Went to workshop, revisited problem/solution. Had a pivot from chat to feedback system. Going to meetup with prof again and Office of Education
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First meetup
We met as a team for the first time today, and started the conversation by reviewing the current idea Zhi Wei and Qin Cheng have.
Idea: A slack-like IRC messagging system for school use between staffs, teachers and students.
The problem we first identified was the unsutability of emails to facillitate communications between students and staffs for short and direct messages.
Some of us expressed doubt about the idea because of its lack of differentiation in its use case as compared to slack. In other words, our idea did not have much difference from what slack is already offering.
Everyone agreed that the idea seems too general and hence lacking consideration towards the context of school use. After discussing much about the various problem we have with the online tools we use for classes, we feel that the idea has the potential to be something just beyond an communication platform.
We did not have any concrete or complete idea at the end of discussion, but we believe no successful startup ever has any good idea that can be conceived all at once. True gem of ideas are only unearthed by constant iterations and refinement.
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