SparkPath

Inspiration

A lot of us have siblings that are in high school. Their experience has shown us that high school can be a stressful time, with ever-changing grades, less sleep, and increased peer pressure leading to depression and exhaustion. Incoming freshmen are aware of the amount of stress they face and are overwhelmed by the impact it has on their future. It is hard for them to live up to expectations and manage their stress levels effectively. We fear this as we move into high school and hope that there is an easy way around it.

What it does

SparkPath is our solution to this! This website offers help to students to help prevent their mental, physical, and emotional barriers from breaking. It provides recommendations for colleges, experienced student tutors, free emotional state self-care chat-bots, and a finance money management advisor chat-bot. The chat-bot helps students understand their emotions, manage their finances, and help them find their path in college.

How we built it

Botpress and Wix were used to build this project. Botpress was used to set an always loop so that when the bot greets the user and asks what the AI has to imitate, it will do so after a certain period. Another channel on this platform was used to choose the person to imitate, which would capture the text and search for the given person if possible. After finding the person, the bot would say "Great! From now on, I will speak like {{workflow.Character}}" and change the character response to fit the personality based on recorded information from many sources, multiple times. Finally, after the user finishes their conversation, the bot says "OK then, goodbye!" Overall, three bots were created: self-care, college-advisor, and financial advisor bots. Each bot requires the user to type in a certain person's name to get specified responses so that the bot knows how to respond like the given person.

Challenges we ran into

1) The members of our group were at a range of coding levels, varying from none to several years of experience. It was hard to learn the steps and processes of coding for those who had no experience. Due to this, we wanted to code a platform that was tailored to the skills of each person (taking into account past knowledge of coding, interests, e.t.c.). We solved this challenge by using Wix as our platform for our website- it allowed for those less experienced to easily create a website, but we also used coding (Python Language), and taught those with less experience the basics of coding. 2) Coming up with one central idea that encompassed all the smaller individual ideas each of us had: Since we are a team with a larger number of people, we were able to come up with a ton of unique and creative ideas, as well as build on each other’s ideas. However, this created a lot of ideas, which were all amazing, and we all wanted to use them. After much debate, pros and cons lists, and discussion, we decided on making a multifaceted app that would allow all our different ideas to grow and become a reality. Through this app, we can fix problems teens face in many different parts of their life, like mental, social, and physical issues. 3) Coding the chat-bot: We realized we wanted to give students a way to vent out their feelings and have a friend-like figure to talk to when they were feeling down or to tell any other problems they faced. However, we worried that the bot wouldn't provide the same comfort that a real friend or family member could. To overcome this challenge, we coded a chat-bot to imitate people who handle self-care professionally and know how to help those who are in mental distress.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) User interface: Wix allowed us to easily create a good color scheme and structure for our website in such a way that is easy to navigate through. It has different buttons that lead to different documents. Because we had a larger number of people we were able to have a large selection of unique and creative ideas and perspectives. We held multiple brainstorming and planning sessions before the hackathon. We looked at problems we all faced in everyday life, and how we could attempt to solve them using coding and app design. Our idea is quite multifaceted and is tailored to many different parts of a high schooler's life. 2) Even though many of us have minimal experience coding, we were able to produce a functioning website as well as 3 different chat-bots. The chat-bots worked quite like real humans, especially the self-care one, which took a lot of work to make seem realistic, friend-like, and comforting

What we learned

Once again, some of us learned how to code and we all learned how to work as a team, brainstorm ideas, and produce and pitch a product. Firstly, after watching many tutorials at home and bringing our A game to the Hackathon, we believe that we produced something that represents us and can potentially contribute to our future. Secondly, working as a team to brainstorm ideas was another big part of the project. Most of the time, we struggled to come to one idea that we all liked or to think of an idea at all. But once one of our members suggested that we think about the challenges we face in our everyday lives, we came up with SparkPath. In addition, we also learned some effective time-management skills when we began making our design and processing our pitch. We know we put our all into it and grew together as girls in STEM.

What's next for SparkPath

Our app is currently directed toward members of our community, specifically the FUHSD school district. We understand that each person is involved in different classes, activities, and more, and want to create a customizable platform for them to craft their journey ahead. With personalized instructions and courses to fit each student, the possibilities of expansion are endless for our website. We hope to further improve our curriculum here at SparkPath with additions of new concepts, such as incorporating time management/tracking features, digital study sessions, extracurricular preparation, and more. In addition, we would love to create an app for SparkPath and make it publicly available so that people all over the world can access it. As of right now, it is an online organization but could be taken in person with classes and seminars from special speakers on prominent issues like mental, physical, and emotional health.

Built With

• botpress.com
• python
• wix.com