It’s been a busy end to our spring break under quarantine. After running out of Netflix shows to binge, the four of us—Amrit Baveja, Beck Lorsch, Rohan Vasishth, and Sasha Sherstnev—came up with another way to spend our time. We entered The Global Hack, and we are honored to announce that the judges unanimously decided to award us first-place in the education track (led by Reid Hoffman) for our project InsideScoop.
The Global Hack was a 48-hour online competition for building solutions to challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It was featured in Forbes, CNN, The New Yorker, and others. More than 15,000 participants from over 100 countries competed to win a portion of a €195k prize pool sponsored by the European Commission, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Estonia’s e-Residency program, Universal Media Group, Cisco WebEx, and many others.
When we learned about The Global Hack, we gathered to see how we could use our skills to tackle some of those challenges. On Wednesday night before the hackathon, we came up with our idea. We felt that as high school students, our experiences with online learning would give us unique insight into how to solve urgent educational issues created by the pandemic.
As of April 12th, 91%, or 1.6 billion, of the world’s students, are now out of school. In this new online education system, we and our peers are reluctant to participate and are often confused in class. An entire generation of students is at risk of falling behind. The transition is just as challenging for hardworking teachers, who struggle to understand if their lessons are absorbed by their students. Additionally, Amrit has ADHD, and online learning has only compounded his distraction and inability to focus during class. Many members of our families are also educators, and we have seen their struggle.
When one of us proposed InsideScoop, the vision just clicked — that was what we wanted to pursue. Over the next 48 hours, we went from just an idea to a full working implementation: a platform that uses cutting-edge computer vision and audio analysis to give teachers insight into the engagement of their students in online learning.
We implemented two applications: a Swift macOS app for teachers that displays real-time student engagement and class participation in an intuitive dashboard, and a cross-platform C++ student app that processes and uploads data to our backend servers. The student app analyzes audio to calculate participation and uses a convolutional neural network to recognize engagement. If you’re interested, our tech stack can be viewed here.
Privacy and transparency are greatly important to us. Students can see the same data the teacher is getting inside their dashboard, and no data is ever stored on our servers. We also plan to add more features to this end, like being able to pause the student app to prevent tracking.
As one of just a few high school teams participating and the only one to win a track, we were surprised and honored to have participated in creating solutions for such a critical problem. With COVID-19 taking us into the online classroom, we see InsideScoop as the platform to bridge the gap of personalized learning in an impersonal education system.
Our Pitch Video
