Tidbits

Tidbits is a gamified web application, designed to provide resources and inculcate learning for effective and equitable collaborative learning worldwide.

Talent is everywhere, but not opportunity

A few of us host community programs on a regular basis to teach students programming. Yet, we realise that the students do not lack the infrastructure - the problem is that the barriers to access sufficient learning resources are too high and the resources do not have a suitable level of progression, especially for middle and high school education. So many students have the potential to learn, yet not the access to the materials. Internationally, OECD describes 20% of young adults on average dropping out before finalising upper secondary education, where they are unable to receive the resources they need - and this makes a huge difference to their futures (a 2019 report established that Americans with college degrees earn 117 percent more a year than those who do not complete high school).

Building a community of learners, not isolated students

OECD, in the Equity and Quality in Education report, highlighted school structure and resources, as well as the way students learn as key components to supporting inclusive learning. Access to a suitable learning community, which can be facilitated online, helps largely in supporting students learn and making the learning process much more enjoyable.

Distracted learning: a big problem turned into golden opportunity

Additionally, it is a known trend that students around the world today face immense difficulty in their studies such as experiencing low motivation and short attention span due to various distractions (e.g. social media, video games etc.). A study showed that roughly 25% of an elementary school student's time is spent distracted, not learning - and even at higher levels, 97% of college students mentioned being distracted by their phones in class. Tidbits hopes to help students overcome this difficulty by combining a gamified system with learning and more effective personalized learning methods, which engages students in competition and motivates them to learn more through setting tangible and less far fetched goals.

Providing quality studying resources

In providing studying resources, our open source universal sharing library allows students and teachers alike to submit learning resources, be it notes, teaching slides and/or activities. We also implement suitable upvoting and moderation systems by trusted sources to ensure quality content. This way, students are no longer limited by any learning quality or content availability. Furthermore, with experience in AI, our development team aims to build on recent AI technology through API endpoints. AI will prove two purposes in our app: 1, to auto-generate a greater stream of questions and answers customized to each syllabus, helping to enhance practice for students and provide quality learning resources without the strain of teachers, and 2, to haul together from the library of resources a customised curriculum for each student, according to students’ learning styles, curriculums and weak areas for personalised learning.

Incorporated immersive studying routines through our gamification system

Learning is behaviour that can be cultivated, and therefore we hope to inculcate proper studying techniques in students worldwide by smoothly incorporating the techniques into our gamified world. In the “Tidbits Town'', students earn Bitscoins from engaging in the library (Notes Sharing Portal), the town hall (community), etc to earn in-game snacks. Furthermore, our app encourages various studying techniques for students. For example, our gamification system rewards relevant skills such as active recall and spaced repetition through our study timer scheme, creating balance between studying academics and exploring non-academics. Ultimately, this gamification system encourages interaction between students on an international scale, allowing like-minded groups of students to support each other in learning and engage in more varied perspectives. 

Overall, in Tidbits, learning is much more democratised and fun outside of the classroom, providing the suitable resources and techniques for students!

In the initial stages of the project, we aim to target the less well off students in Singapore. These students, as described earlier, lack access to additional, useful learning resources as an alternative to tuition, which many of their counterparts are able to afford, but they themselves are unable to. This limits their potential, and the fact that We feel a need to democratise learning resources, allowing everyone to learn something and level the playing field for education. There’s so much resources around the web but none of them have been properly consolidated for learning. This is where Tidbits steps in - as a consolidation of proper resources of suitable progressions of various types, establishing a learning community.

Furthermore, especially for them, education has been overly fixated on grades and school curriculum. For example, coding classes may be expensive and even those with the passion may not have the capital to afford relevant technologies. Many may also lack access to such programmes in their school. Exposing students to a suitable balance between academics and co-curriculars (such as design, business, cooking etc) will ultimately benefit them in the workforce. Therefore, we hope Tidbits will be able to allow any student to learn anything effectively and draw the gap closer between students. 

As an initial starting goal, we decided to place students of our own high school as our initial target audience, in order to test out our platform during its nascent stages. We will then expand within Singapore, before reaching out internationally to benefit students worldwide. 

Our team is a diverse one with members ranging from 16 to 18, and participation is on a voluntary basis with no incentives. 

I would think it would be good to mention the importance of community to us here. Around our communities, we are used to a great nature of helping each other out, a wholesome, positive culture. This is something we’re all just very proud of, which motivates most of us to join in to spread this culture on a wider scale, although some simply want to utilise / strengthen their technical skills.

We are made up of individuals with unique expertise in areas. On our development team, we have individuals who are very familiar with backend and frontend technology, whereas some others are starting to learn about coding at its basics. Therefore, we began our project involving students in pair programming for everyone to learn various forms of front-end web coding and web development basics. We then proceeded to an agile-style tracking and implementation of the app, albeit modified because of the interdisciplinary nature of our members. As for the design team, our members are teeming with creativity and produce eye-catching pages for the web application. This serves to attract potential users and provide them with an aesthetic online environment, which appeals to them for their continued learning with Tidbits. We have members well versed in art, sketch, video production or even simply casual art backgrounds, and therefore work really well in creating all original pixel art, website design and publicity pieces.

Our teacher mentor has a design and development background and he directed our team suitably to carry out accurate idea validation and ensure our idea was actually a suitable one, while overseeing a suitable development timeline.

Validating our idea took a pretty long time - we spent over a few months refining our product’s main features and redesigning the websites for a few main goals:

1. We had to ensure there was a suitable balance between gamification and encouraging studying. We did not want to make our app overly addictive, yet wanted to capture sufficient appeal for students to have motivation to study and engage with the community!

2. We conducted a survey and user interview to understand true motivations behind students’ studying, figuring out key components of the app including the community, resources etc. The general scope was convenience sampling, although we attempted to stratify the groups between income, gender and age groups for high school students.

3. We did several AB testing around our few pages to ensure the most optimal, intuitive and user-friendly UI for students. This also meant using user trials with eye gaze and interactions recorded. The team would be rotated around to sit in, so developers and designers could propose suggestions and understand the entire flow of the app.

Our key feature is this ecosystem, in which we incorporate our study timer, notes sharing portal, community based discussions etc. into this gamified system - akin to a city. The student can then explore these various areas, such as the library (Notes Sharing Portal), the town hall (community), etc. This means that learning is now much more immersive with our trading and BitsCoins system linking between the various features and students pick up good habits such as balancing their time suitably and active learning, not through rote memory, but through habit. 

- For example, to maximise BitsCoin earnings, a student may have to balance "farming ingredients for their snacks" and "selling the snacks" - paralleled to a student spending some time to study academics but also setting some time aside exploring learning something they enjoy and picking up practical skills, say, coding. And it is optimal for the student to rotate between exploring and rest to earn the most BitsCoins. This develops appropriate time management and the pomodoro technique in the student. 

The best part is that students don’t even know that they are learning how to learn! It all falls in naturally into the system. Furthermore, the gamified nature of the app means the student naturally become a part of the learning community facilitated through the trade function, chat and game-like design - encouraging conversations, learning support and allowing to expand their horizons internationally!

On top of that, Tidbits acts as a platform to organise quality learning resources (be it notes, slides, videos, quizzes, activities) and personalise them for every student (be it according to learning style, weak areas or curriculum) using AI, helping students learn with convenience and effectiveness. Every learner can pick up suitable resources and there are no longer barriers for students to progress themselves. Teachers can too consolidate quality teaching resources here. 

Overall, the earlier described problems of the unclear consolidated quality resources, not having a learning community and removing distractions are all addressed through Tidbits, allowing for effective learning worldwide.

Impact goals

Our impact goals are towards the educational industry. We hope to be a key player to establish unlimited access to both academic and non-academic quality learning resources in Tidbits. We are also able to provide opportunities for our users to interact with individuals from diverse backgrounds internationally through the online platform. Ultimately, we hope that students enjoy engaging with the learning process.

How we will achieve them 

The areas of our impact goals fall mainly in: expansion (usage wise) and the quality (scope and quality of resources). We focus on both below.

Expansion

1. First stage: implement our prototype within a sample group in our school to obtain constructive feedback, May 2023

2. Second stage: expand to the Singaporean community, Sep 2023

   1. Aim to be conducted with support with Singapore-based student groups like SGExams, Cyber Youth Singapore, BuildingBloCS etc to grow our user base.

3. Third stage: expand our platform to be used in English-speaking countries, July 2024

   1. We are looking at starting off with Asia with similar curriculums, therefore being able to adapt to similar markets with ease.

4. Fourth stage: expand our platform to be used internationally, (depending on the progress of our app along the way)

Quality

1. To maintain an internal high quality of resources, we have set up an internal AI-supported vetting system and have alumni happy to help out look at the resources.

2. Especially during the first and second stages, we will tweak our app accordingly and hold continual user interviews and surveys in hopes that we can improve the immersive gamified process.

3. Moving on to the third stage, we will start off with locations where we have more leverage on (friends or organisations that we are familiar with) where we can understand the students culture there better before then expanding our UI suitably according to their feedback.

We focus on mainly web/app development along with AI as part of the backend. We are starting off with vanilla web technologies (HTML/CSS/JS) and implementing it along with Flask for dynamic pages. Our database is linked to MongoDB, although we are considering moving it to Firebase since our authentication is currently conducted there. Hosting is simply through GitHub pages and Cloudflare.

Moving past the boring components, for greater pull and immersion, the final product of our app is expected to be a mini pixelated city for the users to navigate around. All features will be incorporated as pop-ups or interactions between the characters in the city. This will be done with 3js as part of a web application design.

Furthermore, we aim to conduct auto-generation of questions and answers of AI adapted to various curriculums around the world, starting from the Singapore curriculum. This way, quality resources are much less of an issue. We tested implementations with APIs such as GPT-3 and will continue exploring how to make the answers more contextualised and accurate to each curriculum. AI will also enable personalised curriculums for each student by matching suitable questions, activity and video banks for each student. Our timeline aims to push these out by 2024.

We’re currently still in the development and testing stage, firstly aiming to expand through our school, then out to Singapore. From our current estimation of students who are currently involved in similar communities through our survey and previously conducted courses, we estimate we will be able to reach out to a further 5,000 low-income students that we plan to serve by end-2024.

Market barrier: Establishing learning communities

Our initial barrier when starting out would likely be establishing the necessary user base and partnerships for quality interaction between students, a market barrier. A key component of our application that we identified in our survey was having quality interactions between students, and this can only be done well if: 

1. there is a sufficiently large population of students to provide resources, help and hold conversations between each other; and 

2. the quality of resources and interactions should be well designed and started during this period. The initial impression of apps usually play a huge part for visitors. 

This startup period is a key period that we would have to focus on as we would need to set the quality of resources, make tweaks to our website and suitably engage with our users to build up the “vibe” of our community. Our team definitely proves sufficient to handle so many aspects of our app.

We also hope that to have sufficient outreach to suitable groups of students and resources, that MIT Solve will have the potential to connect us with relevant educational organisations to support us during this period of scaling up.

Financial barriers

Our infrastructure that we will generally require on the sides of hosting, for both our data and AI services. Our startup costs can be considered to be low as most of such software work on a tiered based model, with free basic features that would be sufficient for our testing phases. However, as we expand, it will be crucial to maintain the sustainability of our app in functioning on these increasing costs. This means we need to select suitable software which suits our needs, and may require sponsorships from various companies who may want to showcase their products.

The funding pool from MIT Solve will definitely help support this expansion period, however we do have plans to be self-sufficient in providing in-app features like advertising and purchases, to be described in section 4.

We are currently not partnering with any organisations.

It would be good to preface this by mentioning that Tidbits is an idea that would benefit the greater public and individuals who need access to this quality content. Tidbits has the ability to democratise learning resources, allowing everyone to learn something and level the playing field for education since learning opportunities and chances to reach out for help are currently not equal for everyone. Therefore, we do not have as great a focus on profit than other organisations / ideas, rather focusing on the financial and development sustainability of our app as we expand.

Tidbits poses a potential opportunity for partners, especially educational related organisations, to access our user base. Tidbits can host an avenue where our users can explore and try out our partners’ applications and platforms in exchange for Tidbits’ benefits (such as experience points and snacks). Furthermore, such organisations will be restricted to those which can provide greater benefit for students, such as knowledge banks like Khan Academy, technology solutions like sites for students to learn video editing, coding etc. which allows a win-win solution: organisations get greater outreach to legitimate students who are interested in learning these technologies, while students pick up useful skills, creating suitable ties between the organisations and the students.

Here’s a breakdown of our cost. Tidbits currently requires funds to build and maintain our infrastructures such as our databases and hosting, as well as an avenue by which we can outreach to people all around the world. As Tidbits grows, we will also require funds to recruit professionals that can greatly help expand our team, and bring about greater quality of the platform to our users.

Partners ultimately play the biggest role in our organisation though: we plan to partner with other application developer teams to share our user base through creating a platform for outreach to each other’s user base. We also aim to reach out to organisations such as MIT and Google to raise funds to support our infrastructure. To support our learning materials, such as educational resources, we hope to seek partnerships with organisations such as Khan Academy, in the view that they can partner with us to share their resources as well as their user base. This also serves as suitable publicity through various educational organisations to expand our user base.

As Tidbits does not have a huge player base currently, and we are not expecting to have one in the months to come (till 2023/2024), our plans to raise funds at them moment would be as such: Creating merchandise representing Tidbits and promoting its sales through our social media channels; Donation drive in the platform itself, allowing users who want to show their support to donate to us; Outreach to sponsors such as Google for our infrastructure. 

When Tidbits’ player base has grown decently, we will roll out more avenues to raise funds to maintain the growing player size as well as constant updates that suit our players’ demands, such as including advertisements (method going about this elaborated below) which allow us to use the funds to carry out both primary and secondary researches (such as in-game surveys) to understand the needs of our players to better tailor our updates to them. The previously mentioned methods will also continue, to help Tidbits obtain funds that will go towards recruitment as a 10-member team will be insufficient to maintain Tidbits when our player population is increasing.

After we expand further, we aim to establish in-app purchases and an advertising feature. 

We have designed a specific snack which facilitates the advertisement function, where a user has to watch a certain number of advertisements in order to obtain a snack which has a specific function that can boost the user’s in-game standard of living.

In addition to all the above, we also plan to have in-app purchases, such as providing  the option of purchasing experience points or releasing non-tradable items to fund our project. However, as Tidbits is more focused on a learning platform, and since Tidbits is also centralised on a natural economy, we will not distort the economy by making it a pay-to-win platform.