EquiTeach

Equitable Education for All

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Inspiration

Inequity in education access is a very pertinent problem which also exacerbates the divide between the haves and have nots. Fairness in access to education helps people prosper no matter their background or circumstances.
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What it does

The application has two main components - the mobile tutoring app and the web ESG dashboard.
For the mobile app, the user can either sign in as a student or as a tutor. Each user has a list of their preferred languages as well as the subjects they excel at or need help with. They can also view a list of their past tutoring sessions. A student can request help for a subject. When this happens, our matching algorithm automatically goes through all the available tutors who are proficient in this subject and uses a multidimensional KNN machine learning model to assign a compatibility score to each pair.

We created an ESG dashboard based off the environmental, social, and governance scores calculated after analyzing articles that showed up after searching the company name along with environment, community, and policy. We then performed sentiment analysis on the text within each article, giving us metrics we use to determine the ESG score for that company. Through EquiTeach, we incentivize companies to make charitable donations in order to help offset the cost of tutoring for students from under-represented, low-income communities as well as from regions affected by natural disasters. By making charitable donations to EquiTeach, companies can earn points towards their ESG score which gives that company higher visibility within our platform as a more sustainable company for people to invest in.

Equiteach uses a system of micropayments to pay their tutors, thereby resulting in lower fees paid by students and potentially higher earnings by educators. This system is highly scalable and can make payments on the order of minutes taught. Each participant in this system has the option of either a fixed charge or a flexible charge depending on amount of time taught.

Equiteach also uses an Uber-like surge payment program, but high fees can be offset by charitable donations as mentioned above. Equiteach also uses state of the art ML to generate quizzes and transcripts after a tutoring session. SMS notifications

How we built it

Javascript, AWS, Python, DynamoDB, React Native, React

Challenges we ran into

lack of time

Accomplishments that we're proud of

working system, app and prototype

What we learned

AWS, micropayments using lightning, QnA generation using transformers from text

What's next for EquiTeach

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