Zeal is an education-based gaming app aimed to help students learn through AI developed by four high school graduates from the region.
The four students, Richey Zhang, Florence Tight, Suhani Sood and Jaskaran Shergill, met at a business incubator, Flow Boat. Flow Boat is a youth startup organization in Waterloo where students use science and technology to address various real-life problems and improve their knowledge and skills in physics, computer science, business, environmental sustainability and other fields.
Each year, 50 students from across the Waterloo Region are selected and form groups of four to six to create solutions to real-world problems such as environmental issues, etc. For their project, this group decided to develop a worldwide education-based app to improve student learning through artificial intelligence.
Tight said that she and her team researched and found out that many high schools, elementary, and even university and college students lack the foundational techniques of studying effectively for tests, quizzes or exams.
“Our objective was to develop an app that revolutionizes studying…We wanted to unlock techniques that allow students to study,” she said.
They believe that AI is a great tool that has the potential to help students learn more effectively, like how computers changed the education system in the early 1980s, offering students and teachers new ways to learn, communicate and work collaboratively.
Zhang, a business developer on the team, called artificial intelligence the next big thing in learning and retaining information. He explained how important it is for education apps to address the learning needs of the students and how AI can support them.
“If we implement AI, we can ask the students what they want to learn more effectively and on a more personalized basis,” he said. “AI has the potential to do much good.”
The project is still under development, but Richey said that the app has a helpful feature that quizzes users on certain subjects, as well as on their feelings about their learning in general. The app requires the students to input their notes, then analyses their learning needs and teaches about areas they need to improve.
Sood said that, through a series of surveys, the team found that repetition is the most common form of studying used by respondents.
So, based on the observations they made through their survey, they are trying to design their app to accommodate this learning habit. They also said this helped them create their main competitive advantage, which is an app that directly accommodates the user’s learning habit.
“Add your notes into the app, and our AI reads through it. Then it forms questions, and you must answer the questions verbally, and that’s how you learn,” said Tight.
The AI used in their app will learn and adapt to the user’s behaviour and use different strategies to accommodate their learning needs.
Despite AI’s integral part in the app’s functioning, its main selling points are gamification and memory retention techniques.
“I think our biggest standpoint is that we gamify our app and make people want to come back and open the app again,” Shergill said.
According to the IEEE Computer Society, gamification produces positive effects for education apps. However, the effects depend on how the app uses gamification and the specific users of the app.
The project is still in the development stages. Once the beta version is released, they plan to finalize the app’s development in September.
They plan to work on the app until the end of summer.
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