Inspiration:
Right now, tutoring is needed more than ever. The pandemic and initial school closures have increased inequality in educational outcomes across racial and socioeconomic lines, creating an urgency to identify programs and policies—such as tutoring—to mitigate COVID learning loss. At the same time, the pandemic further widened socioeconomic gaps.
In fact, not just tutoring but, accessible and equitable education is needed more than ever. Several non-profit organizations are trying to make that a reality but are usually constrained by funding or manpower. Our startup solves this problem.
What it does:
It creates personalized tutor and tutee matches and give need-based aid to tutees who need them with the help of the tutors who are incentivized to volunteer-- while earning. Each tutor can sign up to entirely volunteer or subsidize the cost for students and earn kind points while still receiving base pay. They can then redeem kindness points and get money proportional to kindness in form of PI-coins, which is a blockchain technology allowing for more decentralized, secure, and transparent transactions. Moreover, tutors can advance to different levels of volunteering-- KIND, KINDER, KINDEST, and SUPER-KINDEST to get a permanent base pay raise!
The app also shows ratings, reviews, and resumes of matched tutors so all tutees regardless of financial need can choose from a handful of their matches. Moreover, group tutoring sessions for up to 3 people (the optimal number of tutees according to research for a better learning environment) can also be scheduled. This allows tutees from diverse cultures and socio-economic backgrounds to connect and form meaningful friendships. Our platform allows tutees to connect with tutors/mentors who are leaders in their fields and gain valuable skills/mentorship.
How we build it: Using SQL, Node.js and HTML, Figma, GitHub, and Tensorflow
Challenges we ran into
Thinking about the sustainable financial model was an involved task.
What's next
Right now primarily focus on high school, but we can scale it to middle school, and elementary school for the most impact. This is essential because classroom learning has decreased relatively proportionally across all levels of the educational system. We plan to transcribe Figma to the front end to improve our existing front end and add extended functionality to the app.
Built With
- css3
- express.js
- html5
- node.js
- tensorflow
- typescript
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.