History of the project

How did we come up with this idea ?

The project was born from the idea to reinvent the going to work experience for teachers thanks to sound design. So we asked ourselves how we could use sound design to help teachers to have both a pleasant and useful experience. Connecting teachers seem interesting. But how do you connect teachers in a useful way?

In addition, we wanted our application to provide an answer to the problems they may encounter in their work, in their daily life as a teacher. However, we do not have the skills to answer the questions of the teachers because we are not teachers. So, the idea came to us to propose to the teachers to answer themselves to the questions asked by other teachers. Linking teachers in this way allows the more experienced teachers to answer the questions of the younger ones and to share their pedagogical know-how. Moreover, to adapt our application to transport, we had the idea to make it entirely controllable by voice.

In this way we managed to combine in our application all the issues we wanted to consider.

Details about the Application

Context

When? Where? Who? Why?

“TeacherComu’” is an application that enables teachers to ask and answer any questions about any school or university subject. In fact, you can use this app if you want to get an answer to a question or to answer the questions of your colleagues. Imagine for instance that you are a college mathematics teacher and need help to solve an exercice. All you need to do is go to the app, type your question and wait for another teacher to help you. Now, the best part of Teach Comu’ is that you can use the app wherever and whenever you want, especially while you are going to work (whether you are on your car, on the bus or on the subway…). This app comes in handy especially because of its voice command which enables teachers to interact with the app even while driving. Our goal is to create a virtual community so that teachers can help each other.

Target

For whom?

This application help novice teachers who desire to get answers from experienced seniors. Especially when in the commuting time before one-day enduring workload, novice teachers would always feel they are not so prepared to face one-day challenges. Therefore, he/she would log in our application, to post mood or consult solutions in our community. Moreover, they can search in our articles to get a sense of belongings, published by other teachers about the similar experiences and similar mood.

Service offered

What? How?

The app is very simple and intuitive. The main service offered is that of asking and answering questions. When you launch the app, the main page will directly ask you whether you want to ask or answer a question. If you click on “I have a question”, you will be redirected to a page in which you will be able to type your question. Once you are done, you will find all the answers that might relate and answer to your question. However, if you cannot find the answer to your question you will be able to submit a report to get more help. If you click on “I have an answer”, you will be redirected to a page that will ask you the subject you want to give an answer to. Once you have chosen the subject, you will have all the questions of teachers looking for answers regarding this subjects.
Also, you can configure the app according to you preferences. First, you will have you very own profile in which you will be able to select you personal interests and the teaching field you are specialized in. Second, you will be able to build a community with teachers by adding them to the category “My friends” in order to get help faster.

Identity

Teach Comu Moodboard.

Benchmark

List concurrents / relative projects and describe how they relate/differentiate to your project

Viaeduc : It is an app that display a teaching community network. It might be considered as a competitor but the service it offers is not exactly the same that ours. Indeed, while Viaeduc is focused on sharing teaching resources (exercices, lectures…), Teach Commu’ focuses more on offering and asking for help from teachers all over the world.
IFprofs: This application is a social network for teachers focused on sharing experiences and post articles regarding the teaching profession. The service offered by this app is not the same as ours but can relate.

References

Technical Requirements

Our application basic features works as a social networks or a forum. So there are no complicated technical requirements on this side. Of course our serviceis using APIs and databases to enable the download of information about the questions and the answers asked by the teachers. Databases are also use to enable the features of friends, fields and topics filtering and so on.

The most complicated and huge part is related to speech / voice / text recognition to enable the sound design feature of our app. Indeed, Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition or speech to text (STT). It incorporates knowledge and research in the computer science, linguistics and computer engineering fields.
Some speech recognition systems require "training" (also called "enrollment") where an individual speaker reads text or isolated vocabulary into the system. The system analyzes the person's specific voice and uses it to fine-tune the recognition of that person's speech, resulting in increased accuracy. Systems that do not use training are called "speaker independent" systems. Systems that use training are called "speaker dependent".
A lot of improvements have been made during the last decades ans smartphone often have embeded voice recognition systems. However there are a lot of open source program that aim at solving the different issues of voice recognition

Here are the technical requirement for each features of our app:

Sound design

Sound design : The app is focused on sound design experience. It is entirely usable by voice command in order to improve the teacher’s interactivity with the app and enable him to use it hands free. A vocal assistant is here to please any of your requests. The technology we will be using requires a voice recognition software known as analog-to-digital conversion: analog audio is converted into digital signals. In order to decipher a signal, a computer or an app must have a digital database of words of syllables. You can learn more about this technology here.

Sort

Do not be afraid to get lost in the app : TeachComu’ enables you to sort your topics and fields of interest thanks to many filters. You can create your very own categories according to your fields of study and personal interest. Here’s a sneak peek : (screenshot of the app where you can make categories).

Friends

You have the possibility to add friends, to communicate with them and to create shared rooms to share your knowledge, talk about experiences and more. The technology implemented for this feature is that of instant messaging, to enable teachers to directly interact between them through private messaging. In order to allow teachers to directly interact with each other via instant messaging, we implement P2P connections and Extensible Messaging and presence Protocol (XMPP). Learn more about it here.

Databases

Everything is stored on the application’s database. All questions and answers are recorded and saved on a public database to enable you a free access to huge amounts of knowledge shared by and for your peers. There are many different ways of creating a database : mySQL, Windows, Office 360, etc. Learn more about it here.

Mockups

To evaluate our application, we made a series of tests with differents teachers. Here are the detailed results of these tests available with the links below:

These test led to the general conclusions below and to improvements of the app

The first feedback emphasised a lack of nice design, which was not relaxing, too dark and not funny enough. As teachers like a joyful design, we tried to improve that. The second time the design was still not great enough. Moreover, we needed to make the app clearer and more easy to use. We decided to classify questions by subject. The third and fourth tests were greater: the teacher liked the design, but still wanted to see an app with more interactions and more parts accorded to different topics. We created a space for teachers so they could choose their topic preferences and only have notifications about what interested them. The fifth test was much better: we put some elements to personalise the app. As our idea was to create an intimate sphere for teachers, both to create a personal and community space for them, it was important that teachers feel comfortable within the app, especially with that customisable space.

You can review each step of our mockups building by accessing the following link HERE

Finally here is the final version of the preview of our app:

Documentation page

To go back to our landing page, click on the pink TeacherComu'