Cuetech

Cuetech aims to provide equitable access to quality education to students who live in areas with poor connectivity or who are unable to attend quality schools in rural areas due to a lack of access to good roads and/or financial limitations.

Cuetech platform provides an environment in which students can always learn without the physical presence of the teacher, with features that promote peer and parent/guardian engagement, seamless connection in low network connection areas, and services that promote collaborative work, in addition to ease of student-to-teacher communication.

Cuetech, if promoted and scaled properly, has the potential to redefine distance learning by providing students with adequate, uninterrupted education, imbuing them with core knowledge of Math, English, and programming in order to develop their creativity and make them contributors to their communities.

The disparity observed during this era of covid, in which some schools were able to continue learning online while others were forced to close due to insufficient funds to provide students and teachers with teaching tools. According to data, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of 168 million schools worldwide for nearly a year.

The Cuetech platform's goal is to provide a cross-platform, low-bandwidth, engaging environment for parents and guardians. To provide an equal education to all students globally.

In Nigeria, every single school in the country was locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, resulting in a year lost, which can have ramifications when applying for certain roles with age restrictions.

Using a platform like Cuetech, tutors will be able to live stream audio to their students using this app, along with a prepared lesson slide.

A live audio stream of varying quality would be transmitted to allow students with low connectivity listen to smooth audio. In addition, recordings and slides would be available for download.

As a result, both students who can attend physical lectures and those who cannot can continue to learn at the same pace without interruptions.

Cuetech is a fun educational platform that encourages distance learning in schools. Teaching can be conducted in low-connectivity areas using audio and well-noted slides, thereby broadening the audience reach. To ensure student participation, quick quizzes based on the tutor's prepared slides would be generated using machine learning, and students would be required to answer before a countdown. To ensure 100% participation, quiz results at the end of each lesson would be shared with parents or guardians to track the students' performance.

To allow students with poor connectivity to listen to smooth audio, a live audio stream of varying quality would be transmitted. Furthermore, recordings and slides would be made available for download.
To improve student engagement with their peers and teachers, as well as to boost their creativity in their future career field, educational games, an asynchronous discussion (weekly discussion forum, asking students to contribute regularly), and integration of Google Doc services were used.

Cuetech is primarily aimed at remote primary and secondary schools in underdeveloped and developing countries. Some remote areas in Kwara State, Nigeria, namely Omupo, Ganmo, and Pasa, were used as case studies for this research. The majority of students in these areas were deprived of education during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic due to a lack of good internet facilities. After the lockdown, when interacting with some of the students living in the aforementioned areas, it became clear that a unique method of learning tailored to these students was required.

One of the major issues they face is a lack of internet access, which prevents them from using common applications for online learning. Students with poor connectivity would be able to listen to smooth audio via a live audio stream of varying quality. Furthermore, recordings and slides would be made available for download.

One of the students' complaints was that there were too many distractions, which prompted the addition of the Quiz feature. Another person raised the issue of being hesitant to ask certain questions (as even seen in the conventional classroom learning). Cuetech was then fine-tuned to allow multiple users to communicate in a single chatbox.

The Cuetech solution will allow students to learn from the comfort of their own homes, resulting in a well-rounded individual. This will also foster their creativity and make them valuable members of their communities.

Cuetech's proposed solution is consistent with Equitable Classrooms and increasing the engagement of learners in remote, hybrid, and physical environments, including strategies and tools for parental support, peer interaction, and guided independent work.

Cuetech aims to reach out to students in rural areas who have poor internet connectivity compared to students in cities. The technology creates equitable classrooms by allowing students in remote areas to take and participate in online classes despite having a poor internet connection. In addition, as in cities, children in these areas are given the opportunity to engage in educative online games.

We're currently designing the UI/UX and developing the minimum viable product.

The goal of creating an MVP is to launch the platform quickly, based on our ideas, and on a limited budget. We want to test the hypothesis while minimizing errors and collecting as much quality feedback as possible by targeting specific groups or types of users in our immediate environment.

So far, we have tested the product in five schools in Kwara, and we are constantly receiving feedback from both tutors and students.

Cuetech is innovative in the sense that it reinvents services such as Zoom and Google Classroom in a much more natural and familiar way of learning.

We use low-bandwidth audio streaming and simple slides to give remote students the impression of being in the classroom and participating via direct chats with the tutor.

Unlike a meeting app like Zoom, where tutors use videos to ensure student participation, which may result in students not eventually participating in a large setting, we use generated unsupervised quizzes to ensure student participation and take away the burden of micromanaging students from tutors. This method of instruction allows students to follow the lesson slides and see if they understand the concepts from the previous slides.

Finally, we were able to create a platform that provides a secure environment for both tutors and students.

We are currently testing the product in five schools, with an average of 50 students, in Kwara, and we are constantly receiving feedback from both tutors and students.

We currently have 7 team members, including software developers, UI/UX experts, and graphic designers.

We are also collaborating with learning researchers and educators.

Ibukun, a tenacious entrepreneur and software developer with more than 6 years of experience in the software industry and a strong desire to see Cuetech succeed, is one of them. Adeoluwa, a tenacious software developer with extensive experience in developing web applications, and Mubin, a vivacious public speaker with a natural flair for marketing and pitching to start-ups.

We partner with startup companies to build MVPs and also offer technical services to companies. We have worked with 4 startups in the last 15 months and we are also currently working on in-house projects. Our in-house projects, including Cuetech, when launched (Q3 2021) would provide free and affordable solutions to small scale businesses who lack access to industry-standard applications for growing and scaling their businesses in the digital space.

If selected and funding secured, we will be able to scale the solution and help to redefine distance learning by providing students with adequate, uninterrupted education, imbuing them with core knowledge of Math, English, and programming in order to develop their creativity and make them contributors to their communities.