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Meet the students working to transform education with Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, chatbots, and more!
The 2021 Imagine Cup is all about innovating to help solve pressing global issues, and this year’s competition is focused on solutions in four social good categories: Earth, Education, Healthcare, and Lifestyle. All tech ideas submitted to the competition were developed under one category that best aligned with a team’s passion and motivation to make a difference. In this feature, we’ll look at innovations for Education.
Education overview
The Education category focuses on innovating to change the way students across the globe learn. This encompasses empowering every student on the planet to achieve more, and encouraging lifelong learning, employability, and equal opportunity through tech. Our Education category finalists have developed solutions to support global students, which include a community-driven resource catalog, Augmented Reality support for individuals with learning disabilities, and low-cost remote learning facilitation.
Why it matters
Education influences all our lives and leads to empowerment, opportunity, and developing new skills and technologies the world needs. This field also faces many challenges, including unequal access to education and learning resources, availability of teaching support, and educator tools for effectively teaching new skills.
Our Earth category World Finalists have created projects to empower learners and educators, increase access to learning, and support global students finding their paths to make their own impact.
Meet our Education category World Finalists:
Team Agent of Change, Japan Project: Ujiyan
Ujiyan is a lightweight platform-agnostic chatbot to conduct school assessments. Teachers can publish multiple choices questions using the team’s web app and students can access the test via messenger apps. The goal is to make remote learning more accessible for every student. |  |
Team Cafrilearn, Kenya Project: Makini
The team’s project consists of a mobile application that supports their device, which allows facilitation of digital learning at an affordable cost to low income families and marginalized communities. |  |
Team Hands-On Labs, United States Project: Hands-On Labs – How can we enable every student to have a truly ‘hands-on’ learning experience’ online?
Hands-On Labs is a set of remote laboratories that allows students to observe and remotely control physical tools online in real-time for their courses. The team aims to provide an active learning experience to students from any background all around the world. |  |
Team JAN/A, Czech Republic Project: KnowledgePicker
KnowledgePicker is a community-driven catalog of learning resources organized into network of topics. The project aims to gather links to learning resources and collect ratings and reviews from real learners to determine the best resources. |  |
Team Myotics, Canada Project: Myo Code
Myo Code helps students learn to code complex apps without the challenges of learning a new language. The team developed an AI natural language processing system that enables beginners in computer science to begin coding in their own native language. The goal is to create a zero-barrier entry point into the field of programming for all students. |  |
Team Nyansapo AI, United States Project: Digital Literacy Assessment
The team’s mobile app enables instructors to assess the literacy level of multiple children at once and track the individual literacy progress of children over time. As a digital assessment tool, the projects makes it easy for instructors to collect, organize, and analyze assessment data to effectively place students in the best educational level. |  |
Team QueryCity, Pakistan Project: QueryCity
QueryCity aims to make education accessible for all with its efficient Student’s Search Engine, which features thousands of questions and answers to all subjects. The solution hopes to help students save money on textbooks and other resources. |  |
Team Tandemly, United States Project: Tandemly
Using an array of built-in services and Augmented Reality, Tandemly aims to enhance and transform the educational experience for individuals with learning disabilities. |  |
We’re so inspired by these students’ passion to make a difference and are excited to see them pitch their projects at the World Finals this month. Four winning teams will be selected from each of the competition categories, taking home USD10,000 and Azure credits. These teams will also move forward to the World Championship for the chance to win USD75,000 and mentorship with Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella. Two runner-up teams in each category will take home USD2,500 plus Azure credits.
Follow the action
Follow these teams’ journey on Instagram and Twitter as they head to the World Finals to compete.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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