Share Your Brain
To teach teenagers who use our application to earn an income with their own efforts, while gaining experience teaching others and progressing in their own courses.
Education in Turkey can be quite challenging and exhausting especially in the countries underdeveloped communities. The harsh nature of the education system and the overall lack of experienced educators cause many teenagers to face serious problems while preparing for their exams. These problems can range from just simple mistakes to lack of knowledge in the subject they are studying. These issues if not solved lead to failure in the YKS, the university entrance exam. The entire future of the students, both in terms of the universities they will then enroll in, and thereby their careers, are determined by this exam. To keep up with the system most students enroll into preparatory schools and private lessons which put immense pressure financially on the students and their families. According to 2020 YKS exam statistics, 19 percent of all female test takers and 27 percent of all male test takers who entered the exam failed to pass the threshold of 150 points and failed the exam entirely. Students from disadvantaged families are left behind and as a consequence get a lower quality education. As poor students keep getting substandard quality schooling their families stay below the poverty line. This means that their own children will most likely receive substandard education, and the cycle will continue, thus leaving the family in poverty for an indeterminate time.
Our solution is an online service that everyone can use free of charge as long as they are connected to the internet. This service is provided by qualified students and other authorized volunteers to any student that may want to use our service. We want to design a site where students will be able post the questions they couldn't answer or get uncharged online lessons about subjects they feel less confident in. Students understand students better than anyone else can, so we feel this job is best suited for them. Education is a very lucrative industry for government funding because better schooling develops and upholds a nation and secures its future, so we expect assistance from our local government in terms of popularizing and generally supporting this online service. As this will require technological equipment, and will be utilized especially by students from poorer families, help from local governmental bodies is also crucial to our mission's success.
Our solution serves those less privileged than ourselves, those with less access to the tools of education that we often take for granted. These are people who mostly live in rural areas whose education and personal development are often overlooked by the government, especially in relative terms to richer, more urban areas. The lack of government funding towards their lives and future keeps these groups in a fundamental state of inequality. Their needs will be served by bridging that gap between poor and rich, bringing one group to help the other. The underserved student will gain the opportunity to pick up new skills and catch up to the rest in their academic lives.
In our country there is a gaping divide between rich and poor, urban and rural, majority and minority. There are White Turks and Black Turks. We in the richer, more urban parts of the country are well-endowed with technological capabilities because we have the financial resources that allow us to use them. We recognize that we hold a position of privilege over the poorer rural population, so we only see it as fair that this inequality be addressed. We are in a position to teach without charge what these disadvantaged populations aren't lucky enough to be taught through government funding. As more privileged students, apart from our academic knowledge we are also capable in teaching others in arts and other such activities. We are also well capable in design and coding which will allow us to make an accessible website that can be used by every student in need.
To understand their needs, we first did some research about the education demographic of students from disadvantaged families. What we found in our researches was confirmed when we visited a school in a small village which was underdeveloped and didn't provide enough services for the students. Through a volunteer program hosted by our school we were able to massively improve that school in many different ways. These included brand new laboratory equipment, an area where they could play chess, sports equipments, arts supplies and books. During our visit the students there were also concerned about the capabilities of their teachers and the lack of funding towards extracurricular actives such as arts and sports. We realized that there were a lot of things we knew that they didn't, because they didn't have access to education as well-funded and high in quality as ours. This experience is what gave us the inspiration for our idea that education could happen between students and other students, just as well as it can happen between students and teachers.
- Improving learning opportunities and outcomes for learners across their lifetimes, from early childhood on (Learning)
- Concept: An idea being explored for its feasibility to build a product, service, or business model based on that idea.
- Audiovisual Media
- Software and Mobile Applications
- Turkiye
We are planning to serve every student in need currently residing in Turkey. Technologies like this can take some time to get going so after our launch we don’t expect millions of users in our first year. We do expect more users to join our base as time goes on.
We are all senior students in our high school, so by next year we all will be graduates. As such we will enroll in universities and could have problems gathering together and working for our project, even if we do it is another challenge to maintain the platform, in a presentable shape.
We are not affiliated with any organizations.