Schooler

Our application uses the latest generation of large language models fine tuned on exam resources from various exams like the SAT, CBSE Board Exams, IIT JEE Exams, CLAT, and more. These resources, along with internet access, are used by our model to generate digital exams for students. 

To create an exam, the student launches our app, specifies their grade, curriculum, subject, topic, difficulty level, and selects the number of questions for each question type (MCQ, Short Answer, Long Answer, Fill in the Blanks, etc). Once they click on Generate Resource, within 1 minute, a digital exam is created for them. They can either attempt it inside the application or export it as a PDF document.

If they choose to attempt it in the app, our in app test section monitors the time they spend on each question, their confidence (measured by how often they change their answers), and other details. At the end of the test, once the student submits their answers, a report is generated with the collected information, their answers, the correct answers, and the marks they scored.

We also offer an in app counseling section through which students can get academic, extracurricular, and personal advice from AI counselors 24/7. We plan to integrate these counselors into the digital exams to act as helpers for the students and keep them motivated.

Our model will impact the lives of Pre-K-8 learners and their educators in several ways. First, students can practice any topic they choose at any time. This not only allows them to understand and document their academic abilities, but also to explore their creativity, teamwork skills, and other areas. The questions are designed with progressive difficulty, which helps students learn more effectively. We plan to have counselors available to motivate and assist students while they are taking the digital exams, creating a safer and more supportive environment. On the other hand, educators can review the performance of all their students at once using graphical representations, making it easier to understand which teaching methods work best. Also, educators won't need to spend time preparing tests for students, allowing them to use that time to help students learn more effectively. This reduces wasted time and ensures that the available time is used as efficiently as possible.

Although we aren't in close proximity to the people in the mentioned communities (Black and Latino learners), many of our partners and mentors who guide and support our progress come from these communities. Our partners in the US work closely with us to help us understand how to improve our application to better suit the curriculum, cultural context, and student mindset in their demographic.

We have chosen the pilot stage as the current stage of our model for several reasons. We have been developing our model for the past 2 years, pivoting from one solution to another, starting with an ERP solution and evolving into what we are today. This journey has given us a solid understanding of how startups vary at different stages. Our application has undergone extensive testing, users across our country and beyond, and has shown promising signs of PMF. We are now in the final phase of development, making rapid improvements to address the feedback, issues, and suggestions we've received.

What makes our solution innovative is its technology aspect and the way we have collected feedback, suggestions, and identified issues from thousands of students over the last two years, integrating them into our model to enhance the user experience. As students ourselves, we understand the importance of certain details to improve the student experience, and we've acted on that understanding. We are also working with teachers to ensure that while the student experience is enhanced, it does not compromise their ability to learn. This collaboration has helped us create an environment conducive to maximum productivity. Also, we have ensured that our model is available in more than 70 languages with real time translation, making it accessible to everyone we serve.

Our model operates on a frontend app built with Flutter, utilizing RevenueCat for premium memberships and Firebase for analytics and notifications. We use AWS RDS Postgres as our database and AWS Lambda for our serverless architecture. For most of our large language model (LLM) interactions, we rely on AWS Bedrock, and we use Amazon S3 for data storage. We employ Cloudflare for DDoS protection. All other functionalities, such as authentication and digital exam generation, are custom built. Our model generates digital exams by combining well-tested prompts with custom scripts, allowing it to source just the right content from the web to enhance the digital exams. This is achieved by concurrently running multiple LLM jobs to generate our resources, using different and thoroughly tested prompts for each type of question. The digital exams are checked by a specialized model, which goes through a three layered process to validate the answers given by the students. The checking process starts by evaluating the answer without external data, then cross references it with information from the internet, and finally verifies it using data the model has been fine tuned on. This layered approach ensures the highest level of confidence in the evaluation process.

We know that this technology works for a unique reason: we've been working on it for the last two years, pivoting from one solution to another, and learning what doesn't work. This process has given us deep insights into how students and teachers think, helping us create something that resonates in this market. We've also received valuable feedback from students and teachers, which has been validated by our analytics. At one point, our application had five different sections, but now we've streamlined it to two, reflecting our improved understanding of what works. Our mentors, partners, incubation hub, school, teachers, and friends have played a major role in this process, providing constant support and constructive criticism when needed. Their contributions have been instrumental in guiding us toward a successful solution.

Our plan is to be ready for a large scale pilot in the next four weeks. We're just waiting for our final small-scale pilot round to wrap up. We've already made significant improvements to our application. The evidence of our progress can be seen in the increasing use of our model by students and teachers in our local area, as well as in countries like the US and Canada. We've also observed that students and teachers are increasingly eager to gain access to the upcoming features so they can start sharing our app with their friends and ensure that their entire group is on board. At this point, we're the ones holding back from promoting our premium membership because we want to ensure the best possible experience, which is still a week or two away from being ready. We are aware that our current success could be temporary, and we might face new challenges as we scale up. However, our past experiences suggest that we're prepared for whatever comes our way because we enjoy creating solutions for our fellow students.

Part Time: 3

To ensure that our model is accessible, we've made sure that every component of our platform offers real time translation in over 70 languages, allowing anyone to use it without encountering language barriers. To make our model available to as many people as possible, we’ve designed it for mobile devices, which are widely used. In the future, we plan to collaborate with NGOs focused on education to further broaden our reach. To make our model affordable, we are continuously engaging with people from various countries to tailor our pricing to local markets. For example, in India, our pricing starts from Rs. 75 per month, goes up to Rs. 179 for three months, and Rs. 499 for a year. In the US, our pricing is set at $3.99 per month, $9.99 for three months, and $29.99 for a year.

We are applying to this challenge because we see it as a fantastic opportunity to showcase our model to students and teachers. It's an excellent marketing opportunity for us and a great chance to connect with people and institutions we admire. This will undoubtedly help us climb the ladder a bit faster than we would on our own. We view this as a boost to propel our journey forward.