# First Team Meeting Worksheet


## Team Members Present

* Louis Murerwa
* Abubakar Kasule
* Manzi Bryan

## I. Identify a Common Vision

### Commonalities

We are passionate about creating a product that will be genuinley deployable and useful for people. We also want that product that we create to be used by the people who have the greatest need for technology but who are being neglected.

### Inspiration
* 'The boy who harnessed the wind' - a story of a Dartmouth alum who used his skills to bring energy to his home in Malawi. We are passionate about creating useful, impactful things
* Discord - an application primarily used by gamers and tech-y people to communicate. We like the platform because of how lightweight and heavyduty it is.
* Bridgefy - an application used for Bluetooth based delay-tolerant communication. We like the platform (despite it's security flaws) because the concept of delay-tolerant networking could be profoundly impactful in low-internet environments
* Quizlet, TikTok, Audible, Quora and Instagram - beautiful seamless UX designs which enable users to consume a lot of content without feeling exhausted

### Problems of Interest

* The incooperation of online learning in African schools faces challenges from expensive internet and limited of access to computers. As students who were once part of this education we feel that it is our duty to give back. We are planing on solving this problem by building a mobile based online education platform for high schools in Africa.

* Finding an apartment in a new city remotely is a very difficult process that recent college grads have to endure.The apartment finding process is riddled with challenges like finding roomates ,finding an apartment and scamming.We as upcoming graduates ,we feel responsile to fix this problem by building a mobile app that allows college grads to easily find roommates and apartments.

### Identify
*Which of the above is most interesting to all of you?*
* Online education for Africa

## II. Narrow In
*Now let's try narrowing in on a problem that interests all of you. Make sure to go around the table and listen to everybody on your team without interruption.*

### Problem Statement
*State the problem you want to solve succinctly.*
* We want to build a mobile online learning platform for students who attend schools in areas with bad access to the internet and have limited of access to computers.

### Rephrase
*Try to rephrase the problem statement (negative) as an opportunity (positive). Word it as a question beginning with, “How might we…?”*
* How might we create an education platform that would be un-incumbered by a lack of robust internet infrastructure.

### Reframe
*Reframe the question in at least 5 different ways to change the question fundamentally or imply a different solution set. Try changing scope, or audience, or technology.*

1. How can we provide online education to schools with with a lack of internet access?
1. How can a low internet usage app level the playing field of online education ?
1. How can we simplify classroom management for teachers in schools without a robust internet infrastructure?
1. How can we redo online education ? Can we build a system that uses other forms of device communication like bluetooth or NFC ?
1. Could bluetooth ,the forgotten sharing method, be the key to widespread online education in areas without robust internet infrastrucutre?

### Choose
*Are any of the reframes more interesting? Choose one.*
How can we redo online education ? Can we build a system that uses other forms of device communication like bluetooth or NFC ?

#### Coolness
*What could be cool about this potential project?*
Its potential impact is one big selling point, but we are all also very interest in coming up with some out of the box technical solutions for the challenge that we are facing.

#### Challenges
*What could be challenging / unfun about this potential project?*
The challenges are the best part :). We are not strangers to app development but this will be our first time trying to develop an app that will have to interact with a phones operating system and hardware.

#### Success
*What does success look like for this project?*
Delivering an app that hopefully helps someone somewhere to some extent. Also, we hope it doesn't harm anyone because ethics.

## III. Survey the State of the Art
*Do some research — this will be fleshed out further in a full milestone but do some now quickly all together to get started. Try to find what else is out there that is similar, either products, or technical papers that are related.*

### Similar Goals

Who has similar goals to our platform? There are two components to our platform: a simple mobile application for class management, a content distribution platform, and a low-data solution for people in low-internet environments

Class Management Applications
* **Canvas** and **QuickSchools** -> web-based with low-data costs, not very good at disseminating information since teachers mainly upload PDFs, assumes internet availability
*
Educational Applications
* **Khan Academy** -> high data costs, widely available, high quality content, limited topic coverage e.g. not a lot of information on Khan Academy on Congolese wars or speaking Amharic
* **YouTube** -> high data costs, very widely available, lots of variable quality content
* **Quizlet** and **Quora** -> medium to low data costs (except they display pictures by default). Mainly useful for asking informal questions (Quora) or as a study tool to make flash cards or multiple choice questions (Quizlet).

Low-Data Solutions
* **Whatsapp** -> being used in an educational capacity today. Very low data costs, not very convenenient to use for class
* **Text Message**
* **Bridgefy**
* **Homework on Paper** -> an ancient technology based off of a rarely seen product of *wood*

### Differences
*How is your approach different/better than the state of the art?*

Our goal is different altogether. Quizlet and Khan Academy are *excellent* if you have a good, or even predictable access to the internet. Furthermore, they are good if you have a screen that is *10in X 8in*.

We are trying to make a mobile application to empower people who do not have internet and do not have a large screen.

Since our priority is a low-data application, the state of the art is paper, or WhatsApp.

We hope to create a product that is better than paper because people will be able to store, and distribute things more easily than on paper, while also allowing teachers to communicate with students easily

We hope to create a product that is better than WhatsApp because it will be educationally focused and ideally will use even more internet-free communication

### Inspiration
*Are there any existing products/techniques/research, that we could, by analogy, draw inspiration from?*

We are inspired by the content-display system of Quizlet, the simplicity and speed of platforms like discord and the low-data usage of platforms like WhatsApp.

We are also going to engage with Dartmouth Education Professors to determine which mobile platforms have been used successfully because designing smartphone educational platforms will be challenging.