TAI oportunidades

TAI oportunidades is a online platform oriented to female school-aged people, that disseminates existent development opportunities such as competencies and courses based on Technology, Learning and Innovation (hence its acronym).

In Chile, for every 7 students with scholastic talent, 6 won’t have the opportunity to develop it. So what will happen with the other areas that are not practiced in school? Like STEM.

The lack of awareness of opportunities initially in STEM areas  (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics)
"Talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not" -Leila Janah.

1. Situation in Chile

The virtual Ideathon Girls in Stem Chile 2020, had only 45 participants out of the more than 2 million girls who could apply. Likewise, the territorial gap was maintained in the Chilean Informatics Olympiad 2021, which had 58 students, most of them from the Metropolitan region and male. 

The data is not just a matter of disinterest. There is a masculinization, a gender gap in STEM. According to studies, this is due to: At school age, lack of role models, low support from family and teachers, misperception of these careers and the opportunity gap (disparity in access to quality resources).

2. Situation in United States

From 2014 to 2020, there was a decline of 1.3 million students in extracurricular participation in STEM. Most affected students were from low-income households, which already had the lowest representation in STEM areas, dropping from 4.6 million to 2.7 million. Even though these students accounted for only 38% of all participants in 2020, the 79% of attrition came from these families, 

• Boys (42% vs 36% girls) are more likely to have opportunities to participate in Technology and engineering afterschool programs.

• Only 2,100 out of 42,000 highschools offer the Advanced Placement test in computer science.

Factors contributing to this access to opportunity

Students are limited firstly because they don’t know that these opportunities exist and are available in their environment. 

In schools, this usually is due to funding their resources. While some schools have STEM content such as robotics as an elective or after school club. Several others have limited exposure to STEM because it isn’t part of their curriculum or don't have challenging content and opportunities to dive deeply into STEM learning.

The costs of STEM programs outweigh non-STEM programs (57% of parents say after-school activities are too expensive), and there is a geographic gap to access and continue in them (53% are concerned about transportation). 

Consequences

Without knowledge of these experiences, it isn't possible to access them, this is aggravated for low-income students. That access continues until adulthood, the result is often different educational outcomes and unequal career opportunities, and so on, opportunities in general.

On the other hand, the United Nations warns that failure to promote STEM education with a gender focus will exclude half of the world's talent. There is a risk of reversing women's progress in the labor market.

How many people are affected?

Worldwide, 4,200 million people search for events and news on the internet and 3,345 million people use the Internet to study or learn. While in Chile, more than 536.362 highschool students are affected.

TAI oportunidades is a platform currently created by Google Sites, Awesome Table and HTML, which connects users to external opportunities by showing a description of it, with important data (such as dates,  for who, the price, etc). As users, you can use filters and click on "More information" to be directed to the official page. While organizations that carry them out, obtain diffusion and reach more people.

Current functions:

The platform is currently in the functional Minimun Viable Product stage, the opportunities it actually shows are courses, competencies and theirs hosts in Chile and around the world based on our knowledge.

*We have already developed the log in, but we need to develop the profile settings (personalization) in your searches based on the data provided.

Future updates:

• Add categories starting by the ones displayed at the figma protype.
• Features at our thunkable prototype (space to learn about current projects and inspiring people, as well as to share surveys, since, based on our experience, it is difficult to develop a project without bias during the research).
• Update activities in your mobile calendar and use notifications.
• Fill in application data, digital parental authorization and send postulations.
• Development Routes generated by artificial intelligence, that allow you to create a project, or your own STEM path, according to your surroundings and interests.

Target population

Occupation: female high school students and teachers.
Location: Initially from Chile, then from all over the world.
Level of technology use: Minimally know how to connect to online calls and not afraid to improve.
Interests: Learning, Innovate and use opportunities as well as available technology

Teacher's profile: Estimated amount in Chile 237.159

• Pain: Poorly didactic classes.
• Needs: Knowledge of available opportunities and way to support students.

Student's profile: Estimated amount in Chile 536.362

• Pain: Feeling limited.
• Needs: Knowing opportunities available.

They are affected by not belonging to the "bubble of opportunities" and the gender gap in STEM, initially due to their gender, socioeconomic level and/or location.

*Amount based on the documents: statistics of education in Chile (2018) and Internet usage gap in Chile (2020).

How will the solution address their need?

TAI opportunities seeks to solve the needs of its users by disseminating and solving the background of the gender gap in STEM. 

Impact

• Bringing decentralization and to empower talents to be eligible for scholarships or experiences such as Solver. *We have to comment that since it is a high prestige competition due to its competitiveness, there are people who do not apply, and many more because they don't know the challenges.
  As the team leader has learned from Education USA talks, universities are looking for students who engage in extracurricular activities and demonstrate social commitment. In Chile these also take value when entering the university through the "special access pathway" and many students do not know this until they are already in their Senior Year in Chile.
• Reduce: Social stereotypes and  social digital divide (lack of awareness of the opportunities and wasted use of online tools).
• Expand equal employment opportunities, because you can even find a job through courses, which means improving personal economy. 
• Allowing to obtain new skills, knowledge and recognition.

Our team joined and met during the Technovation Girls 2021-2022 program, in which we developed an idea and project that was selected as award winner at the Technovation Challenge.

In this way, we have demonstrated our good teamwork to carry out the solution by participating in competitions and receiving the following acknowledges:

• National School Digital Talent Award - Los Creadores 2021: Regional winners and finalists of the competition.

• Technovation Challenge 2021-2022: Finalists for the grand prize, representing Latin America and winners of the best technology award in the Senior category (students aged 16 to 18).

• Solve for Tomorrow Chile 2022 - Quarter Finalists.

• InspiraTEC prize 2022

And so the people who make up the team and allow to carry out the solution are:

• Diana Alcota Varas, highschool student: She raised the idea of the problem based on her monetary and location limitation of not being from the central region of the country.
  She won the InspiraTEC national award (for women referents with STEM projects), in the young inspirational category by: Applying with the TAI oportunidades project due its social impact, and thanks to her communication skills, motivation, credibility and social impact. She is in charge of all technical aspects of the project, from the research, business plan, getting contacts and public speaking.
  She takes on this leader responsibility, because of her experience in creating technological and scientific research projects to be later disseminated. However, she is also a competitive programmer.

• Magdalena Araya-Velasquez, highschool student: She raised the idea of the problem based on her limited knowledge of experiences even taking into account living in the central region of the country. Participating in only in the opportunities offered by her school. She was in charge of programming the minimum viable product in app version and adding opportunities to the web platform.

Something that characterizes us as a team, is that we have always participated in free experiences, and the team leader mostly online. We know the reality of knowing a contest or a course when you are no longer of age, or when they have already closed the registrations even if you follow them in their networks... So we live the problem and we want to be the ones to develop this necessary solution so that opportunities don't end up with the same people over and over again. But... This happens with other areas as well!
We could have started by bursting any bubble but STEM is the one that made us realize it, we are already inserted and we feel that is where we should start from because of its big impact into society.

To understand the needs of our target audience, we searched for information in programs, scientific papers, public accounts and related pages, mainly from our country (Chile) and the United States, in which the causes were explained and were shared the experiences of people that lived the opportunity gap mainly by their economical status.

Market validation 2021 (App version)

A survey was conducted using google forms, which had a scope of 12 Chilean people, in addition to having the bias of people already inserted in the STEM world.

We remark the following questions and answers:

• All of our respondents consider it important to be aware of opportunities related to technology, learning and innovation. 
• 7/12 respondents believe that "not everyone has the opportunity to improve".
• Survey participants feel mostly constrained by their economic status and knowledge.
• Do you know ALL the opportunities you could apply for?  Only 1 respondent says she knows all the opportunities to which she can apply
• Do you feel that our app helps to spread and provide thenecessary knowledge to get the most out of technology? Most (10), validated our past prototype.
• Almost all respondents (11/12) answered that they would use the app.

Therefore... The problem and main functions are validated.

Judges feedback

Los Creadores 2021:

We were recommended to motivate the students to use the application through rewards for application to opportunities, which we are still thinking about how to implement.

Technovation Challenge 2022:  Average Semifinals Score = 84.17/90

*We obtained the highest rating by 1 judge (90/90)

"As your app develops, think of expanding to a desktop as a service app too so that it can be accessible to those that may not have a mobile device." - Because of this feedback, we decided to start developing a website, so that more people can access the service independent of their platform.

"I love this idea and it's exciting to know it will make immediate impact in kids' lives. It is great to learn how you identified your target audience by conducting user surveys. It'd be great to understand how your application will show students the path to success."
- Answering the question, this will be through a database open to the public, and through a subscription, it is expected to generate a route to develop skills such as project creation, so that the user does not have to develop it by itself.

"As a suggestion as you build out your business plan, is to partner with schools and/or school boards in communities to ensure they are using this app to gain interest from the students."
- We took this recommendation and plan to implement it after conducting an open beta of the service.

In addition, several judges commented that they were surprised to learn about this problem. We believe that this is due to the fact that when you suffer from this problem you don't know that you suffer from it, because you didn't know that these opportunities existed.

Potential users in Chile

During the Future Congress in Chile 2023, we were able to speak with the Senator for Atacama of the Government, Rafael Prohens; although we were not able to tell him about our project, we agreed on the importance of making students aware of the opportunities available and how it doesn't actually happen.
However, it seems that in the region the focus will be on school students, not taking into account those who do not have support from their school or are educated at home.

Using the data "Education Statistics Chile 2018" and "Internet Usage Gap 2020", we estimate that there are 557,300 potential users in Chile. Taking into account only high school students and teachers who use the internet for education and training activities. The growth can be expected due to: the increasing pattern each year regarding the use of the Internet for learning activities and also because accurate data for elementary school students were not available.

• When participating with the project in the national competition Los Creadores, other students said that they didn't know how to continue with the project or other competitions in which they could participate. In conclusion, there was great interest on the part of those who created innovation projects to solve problems.
  We pitched for 1 minute in a national contest that was broadcasted on the national TV channel NTV. And after that we got several followers on Instagram.
• By talking with volunteers from the AMUJI organization (Young Women's Association for Ideas) and the Atacama regional minister of education, we were able to reinforce the need for a platform that will make us aware of opportunities both in Chile and abroad.
• Within the Technovation Chile Bootcamp 2023 at the Universidad de Atacama, Sede Vallenar, talking to other participants again demonstrates the need for this application, because for several students, this was their first approach to the world of entrepreneurship and / or STEM. Which contrasts completely with the opportunities, even online and free, in which members of the team have been involved.

There's a increase of Internet use every year, more online activities, companies are looking for female STEM talent. There is not something like this in our country, everything is based on alliances and social networks, remaining many times in little diffusion or same select group (bubble of people) 

Current solutions

They mostly have recreational activities executed in person in other locations such as Europe or North America, but no competitions, learning activities, much less of these executed in Latin America or Chile. Google and Meta seem to work better as a diffusion of organizations or applications, but not of "momentary" activities. When following these organizations or profiles, to access the "opportunity" you want, you must enter the profile, biography and if the publication you found was updated, you can enter directly. However, in most cases they do not post only activities, so they can remain at the bottom and not be found. 

We have found a competition site, which has been the most similar, but it has almost same problems as the mentioned above (because their target audiences are college students or older seeking financing for their projects), isn't updated and doens't contain the momentary activities, only the annual ones. So by automating the search for opportunities through webscrapping, we will avoid a similar outcome.

Innovation Opportunities: 

• Platform for all devices.
• Promote the existing opportunities.
• Clicking takes you directly to the request.
• Calls opportunities registration platform.
• Path from inspiration, learning begins to compare with others and opportunities to materialize projects.

New Approach

[Gender focus] Due to the lack of role models and misperception about the STEM reality (reasons of why STEM gender gap exists)- Have a section of current references, and projects to be able to generate this constant inspiration and based on current reality.
As such, we support organizations and activities that seek to empower women in STEM from the earliest age, which is when these gender biases begin.

[Learning] Due to the gap in opportunities and little support from their family/teachers - With the knowledge of the opportunities (calls, tools and organizations), students and teachers will be able to motivate or participate in activities, and in In the case of teachers, trigger an improvement in their classes.
*Soon, by generating professional development routes/projects using artificial intelligence and through an algorithm to fill in applications, the user's time can be speeded up.

[Decentralization] Segregation in the population due to the fact that opportunities end up in a "same bubble" of people - Give greater dissemination to the solutions of the gap in STEM, it is expected to promote different types of calls (training, competitions, school exchanges).

The importance of current calls, with a wide territorial scope and the ability to directly access them for free, WITHOUT having to enter various profiles and hashtags, is valued.

We aim to be the designated platform for sourcing STEM opportunities, we hope that organizations conducting new experiences will turn to us for further outreach. After this, we would begin to expand into another target audience and quite possibly expand the market to another area such as the humanities, as long as they are aligned to be of Technology, leArning or Innovation experiences.

• Impact and collect the story of 16 users, ideally 1 per region of Chile

It is expected to identify the users through an invitation to tell their story.

• Help calls for proposals to increase their applications and participants

By analyzing registrations in calls for proposals, in which the platform's name appears as a way to reach them.

• Motivate people to be persistent and use their opportunities

This will be reflected in the platform statistics of time in the application and actions performed.

The platform was created using Google Sites and HTML code for some functions. 

Recently we were updating a table created by code line by line in HTML to display the opportunities information, however due to its low efficiency and aesthetic limitation... We recently integrated Awesome Table, an add-on for catalogs that allows the user to filter information connected from a database, which in our case, is in excel.

Based on our talk with Allan Leinwand, Shopify's Chief Technology Officer:
We expect to integrate MySQL, a relational database management system based on SQL; to manage the automatic search and storage of opportunities.  In addition, we hope to automate the search for opportunities and their respective information through WebScrapping, which is used to extract information from websites, so we have thought of using the wget tool for that.

We are currently in mentoring stage, which is why we haven't yet launched our solution.
We hope to serve about 3,000 users next year.
To reach them we want to use word of mouth, contact student councils in our locations, use youtube to record the evolution of TAI; instagram reels and Tiktok to generate curiosity; instagram posts to inform. Finally we hope to integrate ads from our platform on Instagram.
However we believe that what will give us the greatest advantage are our partnerships, progress in national and international competitions, in addition to the contact of various presses that we have obtained during these almost 2 years.

Barriers that may limit our impact in the coming year: 

Financial: As "company" we currently have no funds, however we have the vouchers that grant us licenses and credits on various platforms.

Technical: The application does not have its own domain and is being developed on google sites, which makes it difficult for UX (user experience) design and quickly find the page.
The mentorships we are currently working with do not contemplate the development of the platform, but rather its scalability, which is why we are having difficulty implementing the expected technologies (SQL-based development and webscrapping through wget).

Legal: We are working with Transbank to concretize the development of the company in Chile in order to make alliances and be able to access greater benefits. However, this process takes some time and one of the team members must be of legal age to carry it out. 

Cultural: We do not know all the opportunities in our country, so we must continue to investigate them before we can expand to other countries.

Mentoring

• Huawei, we have an annual membership to the Spark program of Huawei Cloud Chile, so we have expert mentoring and advice, we will be part of an ecosystem of entrepreneurs, and finally, we will count with the concrete possibility of expanding the venture in the LATAM region and entering the Chinese market, with the support of Huawei.
• Amazon web services LATAM, advice from an Amazon Business Developer.
• Transbank, cycle of mentoring for the project and advice for the construction of digital solutions through its Innovation Lab.

Licenses awarded by Claro enterprises to digitize business, back up files and manage them.

Opportunities data

• Kodea, they gave us permission to share about their iniciatives such as courses and competencies.

TAI oportunidades will be operated online, as a social enterprise.

Mission: To reduce the digital divide and the wasting of opportunities through dissemination, seeking to contribute to the democratization of knowledge for all, because we should all have the opportunity to improve. Because we believe in justice, in stability based on knowledge.

Type of intervention: Online Platform

Pricing to use the service: $0

Where will you find it? Site online, so it doesn't matter your platform, you only need the internet.

How developed is it to be taken to the user? Minimum Viable Product, when entering you get a simple overview of how everything would work. 

Key resources: 

Opportunities information, storage for its databases Branding.

Key activities: 

• Collect opportunities information, initially manually and later on through WebScraping to be followed by monitoring of its operation.
• Send email notifying about the information being deployed through the platform to the hosts of the opportunities.
• Update the database and platform  through adding new categories such as higher education entrance scholarships or exchange scholarships. 

Partners + Key Stakeholders:

• Organizations that host the opportunities displayed on the platform.
• Spark Cloud Huawei Cloud Chile Program.
• Our current partners are mentioned in its respective category in the application.

Channels: Platform, partnerships, Email, Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube.

Customer:  Organizations that host opportunities
Customer Relationships:Automated through e-mails and personnel for meetings or events.
Customer Value: Dissemination of their competencies, courses, projects, etc. Basically the opportunities they have created

Users: Female school-aged people and teachers
Users relationships: Automated to showcase opportunities and personnel through social networks
Customer Value: Connect to available opportunities initially in STEM areas

Impact measures: Rating, recurrent users, click to the advertised opportunities and number of subscribers.

Cost structure: Marketing, salaries, equipment (internet), software and mentoring (to integrate SQL and WebScraping), availability (web domain) and  brand.

Surplus: Platform improvements, prizes for users to incentivize engaging in extracurricular opportunities, social appearances and supporting organizations.

Revenue Stream: Market linkage, Market survey to universities, Subscription to access customization.

Because we have not yet had advice for a business plan at a competitive level, the data below is generated based on the knowledge delivered by Technovation Girls, which we adapted to a web platform rather than an application.

Revenue models:

1. Market linkage or adversiment of opportunities: Working as a network, it connects users who are looking for an opportunity with the official site that provides it.
2. Market survey to universities on the areas of interest, type of activities and outreach to teachers and students.
3. Subscription to access customization, fill in data, send postulations and digital parental authorization.

The following figures are calculated in USD.