ARK-ademic

Teacher can record their lesson
Students get a simple interface to answer questions
Teacher's results dashboard displays results

Introduction

Ark-ademic is a web app that transforms spoken words into interactive Multiple Choice Questions! Ideal for teachers seeking increased engagement and real-time feedback, or students looking to self-assess through lecture recordings. Elevate learning with easy transcriptions and interactive assessments!

Inspiration

We were inspired by memories of low student engagement in classrooms, and brainstormed how we could make classroom learning more fun without putting undue pressure on the teacher. This led us to attending the CodeWords workshop and we were inspired to use their platform due to their ease of integration and wide range of APIs available. We are aiming for the EdTech prize due to our tools potential to improve classroom learning, and the daily use prize due to the simplicity and potential frequent usage of it.

What it does

ARK-ademic starts recording when the teacher begins their presentation, and creates a transcript of their speech, which is then sent to an LLM that generates multiple choice questions based on their lesson. Once approved, these questions are sent to student devices, where they can be quickly filled in to check understanding. All results from students are anonymised and sent as statistics for each question, which the teacher can view on a dashboard and use to pan the next lesson to target any weak topics!

How we built it

We used CodeWords to help generate the back-end, and the React framework to make all the front-end components. We also used Whisper API to manage the speech processing for transcription.

Challenges we ran into

GitHub merge issues ..... the usual ...... Also the runtimes of our LLMs took a concerningly low time and struggled with file size, leading us to break the audio into chunks for more manageable processing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting much more familiar with React and TypeScript! We are also proud of the wide applications our tool could be used in - from school classrooms, to lecture halls, to any presentation that could be gamified.

What we learned

Lots of ways of dealing with CSS restrictions, as well as larger data handling with mP3 files.

What's next for ARK-ademic

Neatening the project structure! Additionally, we are quite a design-minded team but haven't been able to focus on design due to time constraints - so it would be great fun to redesign the UI.