HuddleUp

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Overview + Research

Think back to all the group projects you have been a part of throughout your academic life. It can be a nightmare for those who've been on teams that could never stay focused, lacked clear communication, or failed to complete work, leading to late nights and missed deadlines.

According to 66 surveyed respondents, they reported feelings of annoyance, dread, excitement, fear, stress, anxiety, fun, and precaution when they hear their teacher announce a group project. They worried about predetermined groups, peer accountability, shouldering more responsibility, their academic record, public speaking, and the scope of the project.

Group work pedagogies in education are becoming more popular since it encourages group collaboration, cooperation, and cohesiveness. Additionally, these methods foster critical thinking, creativity, and communication skills among students, preparing them for the diverse and interconnected world they will encounter in their careers.

However, teachers have reported difficulty and frustration when incorporating group work in large enrollment classes because it requires extensive and time-sensitive supervision to ensure fair collaboration and mediate team conflicts.

Our unique and innovative solution aims to solve the following group problems:

Group Cohesiveness: Group cohesion refers to the degree to which members are drawn to both the group and its objectives. It encompasses feelings of mutual affinity, dedication to the task, and pride in the group. Understandably, these elements are linked to improved outcomes in group and team settings.

Social Loafing (Free Riding): Studies backed by our surveys and credible online research shows that Social Loafing is a prevalent issue within many group settings. Not only does it promote inequity of workloads, but also an unfair grade for those that did most of the work.

Conversational Turn-Taking: With the variety of different personality types within a classroom, those that are naturally more quiet or soft-spoken are not given a fair opportunity to contribute or participate compared to their peers.

Peer Ratings & Evaluations: Currently, teachers are unable to determine the effort and achievement level of individual students during group tasks, so they rely on peer ratings, peer evaluations, or self-reports.

Our Solution

HuddleUp is an academic support tool that helps teachers take preventive and corrective action with project-based learning, ensuring equitable student participation and rewarding productive social interactions.

Our automated system allows teachers to create nearly balanced groups, analyze team performance, identify the need for intervention, respond to questions, and grade projects with ease.

Features

Group Matching: Our matching system groups individuals by their grade in the class (or GPA), personality test results, listed skills, and social sensitivity (reported by past reviews) for group cohesiveness. There is an option for teachers to generate a recommended group of 3-5 or allow students to choose teammates on the platform. Students can discover highly compatible teammates and view peer profiles to gain a sense of trust and reliability, moving forward with the project. They have the option to “divorce” a team member, leave a team, and request a team-up.

Task Management: Instead of role assignment, HuddleUp focuses on task assignment through AI-powered scheduling and task automation based on real-time workload, deadlines, personal availability schedule, and unexpected events to effectively streamline student workflow. Teachers set the project scope and deadlines, and students create tasks and claim ownership of responsibility. If a teammate is unable to do a task, it will send a ping to all teammates to reassign the task. Teams can access all shared documents in one workspace and collaborate on projects simultaneously. The platform offers a range of formats to organize content, including tables, calendars, and boards.

AI Assistant: HuddleUp has incorporated the concept of AI, one of which is an AI Chatbot. ChatTA, the assistant bot, serves both as a refresher to the instructions and a guru for frequently asked questions. This idea was implemented in order to increase efficiency by cutting down the time a student idles and waits for a teacher to answer questions. Firstly, the teacher will input any necessary information by either filling out an FAQ that only the teacher has access to or uploading a pdf with all the necessary information. To provide the most accurate responses, ChatTA will, in addition, gather information from the instructions. After, students will be able to access the chatbot’s resources through an icon on their interface. Instead of being derailed by the same repetitive questions, teachers can finally assign a project and finish their side tasks with ease!

Intervention Alert: These alerts allow students to be reminded if they are behind on their part of the work from the due dates groups have collectively agreed upon. Students will be sent these notifications for the first two times it occurs, and a third time will have one be sent to the teacher for further review via the dashboard. Teachers will have a clear understanding that the problem has been reoccurring and to take action on the matter.

Profile Work Track Record The student profile contains a unique feature that records and saves an individual's group effort in past projects. To encourage higher student participation and accountability, their record stays with them for a year until they have the option to clear their history or keep their history track. Instead of peer reviews going to teachers, the results are shown on the peer's profile in the form of team/skill badges or letters of recommendation. To maintain a healthy conversation, all badges are positive traits, and recommendations must be approved to be shown.

Plagiarism Checker Another AI feature incorporated into HuddleUp is a plagiarism checker, Our built-in Plagiarism Checker utilizes industry-leading AI technologies to detect plagiarism within submitted papers and assignments using sources online and complex algorithms for comparison features. The following view also displays more detailed and advanced information when viewing version history such as for grading, overall insights, and personalized metrics.

Insights Page Our grading system replaces peer evaluations to teachers into individual reports on student work insights in order to determine the effort and achievement level of individual students during group tasks. These insights are created from the version history compilation that shows the percentage of work per person. It includes whether it ai generated or copyrighted information. Teachers are able to compile the overall group grade and individual grade on HuddleUp and link it to Canvas. Add other grading features here.

How we built it

Phase 0: Project Overview + Requirements: Scope of project Phase 1: Group Formation Phase 2: Instructional Facilitation Phase 3: Grading & Work Insights

What we learned

Our ideal customers are teachers who feel frustrated when facilitating group work in their classroom because it requires extensive and time-sensitive supervision to ensure fair collaboration and mediate team conflicts.

Our backup target audience is students who feel angry and discouraged from working on group projects because of a lack of instructional guidance, internal communication, and peer accountability.

We learned that people are actively trying to solve these problems with confrontations with non-participants, solely meeting up in class, scheduling meetings based on priorities, and seeking teacher intervention. However, there is no sense of urgency or repercussions for failure to contribute to work.

What's next for HuddleUp

Our riskiest assumption is the pricing. We want to create a launch page to see how many people will prepay for our service. We have different price points in mind to gauge how much people are willing to spend on the preorders.

Built With

• figma