Social isolation has caused a breakdown in the whole of society. Breaking the routine, feeling helpless and increasing stress levels are all indicative of the harm that isolation has caused. In addition, several students were also affected. The portion that does not have resources available for distance studies was one of the most affected. According to data from an IBGE survey, 28.2% of the Brazilian population does not have access to education.
Thinking about meeting these needs, the proposed solution is to create a virtual teaching application, based on the programmed teaching method, proposed by Burrhus F. Skinner. In this method the idea is to learn gradually, performing small exercises daily. In addition, when using the application, the user will feel like a game, making learning more fun, and increasing user engagement on the platform. Because it is a method that requires daily exercise, it tends to form the creation of a routine. This helps those who have some difficulty in maintaining an activity daily, going beyond the study itself. This application is efficient, because according to CETIC data, about 93% of Brazilian households have at least one smartphone. The purpose of this application is to bring quality education to all people, and encourage learning and the search for knowledge constantly, making students themselves protagonists of their teaching, in an interactive and light way.
The use of this application by people who are in isolation, as astronauts on missions, would be efficient due to the fact that several psychological problems would be remedied, such as the feeling of helplessness and mood disorders (data from NASA state that about 5.2% of isolated researchers on missions suffer from mood disorders), because via the applied teaching method, in addition to acquiring new knowledge, the user receives small achievements, thus helping in their motivation.
When our team found out that we had an opportunity to use the huge database of NASA to create a project that helped humanity to get trough this tough time that we are living we new that it would be an one time opportunity. We also agreed that it would have to be an idea that would help humans even after this pandemic, so we started researching and brainstorming ideas that would fit what we thought.
Between all the areas affected in the pandemic we found the educational area being the one that we could help the most, we knew that many students didn’t have the motivation to study and that all types of applications for kids were growing a lot in the market. So we came up with the idea to make a platform in which students were motivated to learn, we knew that to keep the kid’s attention and for them to keep the focus in the study the application needed to be interactive, the activities couldn’t take too much time and it couldn’t be too hard so that kids would want to quit.
We studied various teaching methods and we found the programmed learning to be the perfect fit: A method that consists in the student doing a lot of easy activities, with the activities getting gradually more complex. With that the student fixes the content of the classes by doing activities every day. We asked more than 50 middle and high school teacher and 90% of them agreed that it was a good method for middle and high school students.
The next step was to search if that was something similar that already existed in the market, and for our surprise there wasn`t, the only platform that existed was focus only in teaching languages and didn`t have a focus in middle and high school students. So, we had the plan: a platform for middle and high school students that with gamification motivated them to do activities daily, and that could even connect parents and teachers accounts. The questions of the activities would be made with the help of the teachers that joined the platform, who could even create different groups, with different leaderboards, for each class.
To make that happen we develop the application with Java and Android Studio.
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