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Providing Formative Feedback and Helping Teachers out in Underprivileged Areas through an Auto-Grading Software
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I’m a 16-year-old based in Toronto, Canada! I’m consistently looking at how I can grow as a person while working on things that are important to me. Recently, I held a position at Walmart Canada’s innovation hub as an innovation intern where I learned all about retail innovation. I’m also the head of an organization called Resources for Youth in India (RYI) where I teach underprivileged children in India!
My Background
Ever since I was a young girl I was super interested in education. Every Saturday morning, I led lessons about things I learned in kindergarten for my parents. The 2-hour sessions were dedicated to topics such as the alphabet, my favourite shapes, colouring techniques, and number games. Though I was only 5 years old at this time, this passion for education was already instilled in me.
Fast forward around 2 years… it was my second time visiting India but my first time being old enough to understand what was going on around me. As I visited family and friends of my parents, I first-hand saw the inaccessibility to education as it pertained to some distant cousins, friends, and neighbors, particularly young girls. I remember seeing one of my cousins’ neighbors who only had enough money to send one of their children to school and decided to send their son. He would come home every day and as he did his chores after school, his sister would open his backpack and try to understand his homework, as she did her best to teach herself through his resources.
Over the past few years, every volunteer or work experience I’ve had has had some sort of impact on children. A few summers ago, I volunteered at this organization called Sara’s education fund where I made math and English worksheets for underprivileged children in India and Nepal and also taught them lessons on zoom. Now, 2 years later, I’m the head of this organization and am looking at how I can further expand it and target even more children in India and soon around the world.
A picture taken of my co-head and I as we taught some children in India!
59 million children in developing countries aren’t able to even receive a basic education.
As I taught some children in India I saw that accessibility to education was not the only problem and that access to a good quality of education was more of a problem in most developing nations. The teacher-to-student ratio in many middle and high schools in developing countries can get up to 85 students per teacher in places such as the Central African Republic. This creates a massive burden on a single teacher of teaching multiple students and reduces the amount of one-on-one time that teachers have with their students. Over 35% of the time that teachers spend in their jobs is spent on tedious tasks such as marking and yet even that task itself has over a 30% error rate. Efficiency in teaching is something that is crucial to move the industry forward and providing children with a better education.
Artificial Intelligence, an emerging technology, can make a dent in many problems that developing countries face in terms of education. Not only can it do more than humans, but it can also learn and adapt as it goes. AI takes the data that it is given and uses it in the way it is told while also finding ways to optimize the process. Auto-grading softwares, voice assistants and other personalized learning softwares are some of the few things that I looked further into in the intersection of AI and education.
<aside> 💡 A key insight from this research on the intersection was the importance of incentives. Developing countries face a lot of problems and though many of these problems have some kind of solution, they often tend to be extremely expensive or inaccessible to the general population. To be able to implement solutions, we must be willing to provide some sort of incentive. Through every step in this process, I made sure to keep this in mind and made sure to not only build a model but also think and write about how and where this would be implemented.
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Over the past 3 months, I’ve been further researching this intersection of AI and Education. Throughout this process, I’ve had two main goals through my projects: