This past week the Education and Entertainment team was able to accomplish a substantial amount of work both on the smart plan and on the product we are creating. This week the team put in multiple hours and met multiple times to meet with Professor Solomon, to discuss and  consolidate our smart plan idea and to talk about the next step in polishing our plan. We met with Professor Solomon on Tuesday morning to brainstorm our ideas and ask him about how his school curriculum is better from other schools in India. In addition, we conducted one more interview on Monday with an employee from Philips Company who was born and raised in Vizag. We asked him about how we can improve the education system and what didn’t work for him when he was a student. We also met on Friday morning to meet with the MentorRoom founder Dante who is developing an educational platform that embodies everything in our smart plan and discussed additional services we would need for our smart education plan and how this would be implemented. Moreover, we also talked about a revenue model, whether we wanted to make our service free or not; from our point of view it would be best to provide a free service so that all students have access to it.

Prior to consolidating our idea we interviewed a Phillips employee who told us that one of the problems in the education system in India is the quality of teachers. When college graduates aren’t able to find a job they resort to becoming a teacher which in turn results in a lower quality of education as they aren’t motivated to teach. He also mentioned that  India has enough funds for resources but these aren’t properly utilize on effective teaching aids, or quality resources. He also mentioned that there is an issue with the teacher to student ratio, and discusses about the differences in quality of government vs private schools which was new to us. In our meeting with Professor Solomon we discussed the distribution of technology to students as a way to globalize education, and the pros and cons with moving forward with this idea. We also covered some of the issues with the distribution of tablets and corruption of the education of a student which we said could be solved by having a strong identification system developed by the government.  Professor Solomon was also able to give us some valuable resources that we could research and analyse to help us improve our smart education plan such as looking into the University of the People who is already providing free education.

In conclusion, we are in the stage where we are set on what idea we want to move forward with and have started a document where we will be formatting our smart plan to try to cover every possible outlying case which can come up in our presentation to the Prime Minister. With respect to our prototype, I believe that we have made significant progress. The main functionality for the application we will be presenting has been developed and we are currently working on product design. There is still a lot of work to be done but I believe that we will have a good beta version for the midpoint review with the city officials of Vizag. As a team we have decided that the next step in the development of our smart education plan is to do research on the outlying cases such as cheating, validation of degrees, unmotivated students and how can we help cover these issues.

The Education and Entertainment Group

Itzel Martinez, Arshad Ali Abdul, Divya Suri, Julio Dominguez, Rosie Serrato