Tuesday, November 15, 2022 a 2 minute read
Categories: final-project peer-review
This is a peer review on behalf of Team Roomba for Team PEKing duck. Their final project diverge video can be found here.
This problem seems super clear to me. Making homework more fun and gamified could help out in K12 education, and I think there are a lot of existing platforms out there that try and make assigning homework easier for teachers. This could also help students engage with the content, instead of getting bored with their homework.
I love the idea of the solution, and the concepts seem clear to me. For high achieving students, this might help homework be more enjoyable to get done. Aggregating the points by class is a great idea, so that students who struggle aren’t feeling left behind when other students contribute points faster than them.
This also could be combined with in-class incentives, like the top class getting a pizza party if they finish first at the beginning of the year, which fits in real well with K12 education.
While I like the intention behind the problem, I’m not sure how much of a “need” there is for keeping track of your recycling. Just trying to figure out whether a given container is recyclable in your area or remembering to put it in the bin is often hard enough.
I do think there is a need for connecting people to recycling resources in their area, especially for more hazardous materials like paint and batteries, but I’m not sure if this counts as recycling “education.”
The concepts in the solution are clear, and it makes sense how someone would use the app. I especially like the idea of connecting communities together to recycle more, like making it a competition. Using trivia in the app is a fun way to teach people more about the environment.
I could see this solution could be used in elementary school to teach kids about taking care of the environment and recycling.
As someone who only speaks English, I don’t feel qualified to discuss the need for this type of app. If you would use this or know people that would benefit from this, go for it!
One quick comment though: If you’re targeting immigrants or older adults, you may need to focus on making the app simple and low-tech to be more accessible to these users.
The solution is pretty straightforward, which given your target audience makes a lot of sense. However, the annotations seem like a pretty common “comments” section for the dictionary entry. The annotations and entry concepts seem a bit disconnected, and I’m wondering if annotations could be organized somehow to give a more educational experience for language learners.
One practical consideration is that you need to build a dictionary from scratch. Have you thought about how you might do this? Are there dictionaries out there with APIs or with favorable licensing?
If you haven’t come across it yet, Wiktionary is like Wikipedia for the dictionary and might be a resource to work with.