Learning new languages can be a daunting challenge. Students often feel overwhelmed and stressed when it comes to expressing themselves in a language they barely know.
Essay assignments are an incredibly efficient way of improving language skills, and most classes have already adopted the habit of giving at least one essay for students to write each week.
From our experience essays are a burden for students, because they cannot see the immediate reward when putting in all the effort. The reward usually comes after years of diligent studying - the ability to comprehend a language other than their mother tongue.
Our solution to this problem is to gamify essay writing by converting it to a fun and social exercise. Teachers can create assignments online, which are visible for their students. Students write their essay and upload to the class dashboard for everyone to see inside the class. Everyone has to read everyone's essay and can peer review it by submitting comments, upvoting and correcting mistakes. Gamification is achieved by collectable trophies and finding keywords in people's essays which they were required to put in any shape way or form.
During the course of a day at DisruptBerlin Hackathon, we have transitioned from ideation phase to a prototype. Obviously, there is a huge possibility of improvements and we are eying on improving this prototype further.
The target for the app is to have a B2B platform. We intend to design it in a way that language school and classes can use the app.
- Teachers can add students to the course, who are enrolled through invitation by email.
- Teachers can create assignments visible to all students. The assignment consists of an essay question and a list of keywords distributed to students to incorporate in their essays.
- Keywords are a fun way to diversify assignments, create funny scenarios, promote creativity and increase vocabulary.
- Assignments are posted by students to a dashboard.
- Posts are visible by all students, who can comment in the language of the course.
- Students and teachers can also react to essays with
amazing,well-writtenand/orhilarious. - Students with the best compositions can earn trophies for each assignment.
- Implement support for more than one class
- Create a scoring system based on the number of reactions, trophies and grades.
- Students with higher language knowledge will do Peer review of students with lower proficiency. Eg- German b1 student will do review of German A2 students'
postsand improve it. - Students can also choose to talk to other student by meeting with students who are close to them in location.
- Providing sentimental analysis of the text by using NLP so that student get interactive analysis.
We are proud that we have met at Disrupt and formed a three-people-strong team to tackle challenges in language learning which we have all faced at some point in our lives. We believe that our product is a unique application convenient and fun for both students and teachers, therefore, it has a bright future in transforming the acquisition of foreign language skills.
