GRADE 10 SERVICE

INVESTIGATION

Our project goal

Creating a platform to increase support for students by having mentoring and peer learning opportunities through an online booking system to further enhance peer and teacher support.

In a group consisting of Rayan, Arya, Shahim, Eliana, Anahita, and I we aimed to develop a web application to tackle the problem of students not getting the help the need and are dependent on due to lack of time in school hour and lack of availability of teachers during supervised study. We aim to create a platform that increases support for students by having a mentoring and peer learning system through an online booking system to further enhance peer and teacher support. To evaluate the need of this project we looked at how many students can benefit from the program, which programming languages are the most suited to creating this platform, how effective is using an online booking system and if students would like to be a part of the mentorship program. The potential action we aim to take is creating an online platform ( web application ) that will have 2 sections, 1 for booking meetings (on campus through zoom) who were not available during supervised study and other school timings, and another for booking meetings either through zoom or on campus with volunteer students who would like to share their knowledge. Our community consists of students, specifically focusing on Senior School as well as the Senior School teachers at the Aga Khan Academy Mombasa. We chose this specific community because our issue is prevalent in the community mentioned.

Needs Assessment

To further investigate the need of this project we did a needs assessment, where teachers and students were asked questions based on the web application to calculate its value. We asked teachers if they felt they were not able to give students enough time, if they felt students were very dependent on them, what are some of the features they would like to see in the web application.From the needs assessment, we can see that many teachers support our project as 64.3 % agreed that their students are too dependent on them and struggle if they are not there. In addition, 71.4 % of them agreed they struggle to provide students with assistance due to lack of availability and time. This helps us see that there is a need for our project, as both students and teachers are struggling because they are not able to get or give the support they need. When asked on a scale of 1-10, how do you think an app where you could book meetings with them will aid you to provide them with the help they need, all teachers voted 5 and above, clearly supporting the fact that a system like this in AKAM could be very beneficial. There are some main points many of the teachers addressed we could add to our application, they are:

The addition of a calendar, to show their availability.
A notification via email when anything important has occurred or needs to be done.
A place where class resources can be added
A feedback page
An option to create virtual meetings
Creating a place for session reflections

From the student responses ( evidence can be found in Appendix 2) we were able to see that the majority of the people who responded are in year ten (55.2%) whilst the rest of the 44.8% are in year nine. Year ten students are mostly being impacted as they are in a candidate class.

58.2% of the of the responses said that when they need help during SS they are not able to get it as the teacher is either too busy helping others or is not in attendance. (41.8% said otherwise)
A staggering 88.6% of the responses said that they will benefit from a peer to peer learning program
As well as the above 40.3% believed that this app will allow them to learn more effectively with a 10/10.
In addition the extra features that are most asked for include a mobile app version, a place where they can view their schedule, a helpbox and that it shouldn't take up alot of storage.

To further confirm our needs assessment we interviewed Mr Dudi who is the dean of studies to understand the scope of our project.. From his interview we received very positive feedback that we should continue our project as it can be very beneficial to enhancing learning

From this needs assessment we were able to see there is a need for our project due to obvious majority and statistics, and we were also able to identify the criteria we needed to meet in terms of features of the web application. Finally we also created a proposal focussing on our needs assessment, the units we are focussing on, our community, our problem, and our proposed solution which got approved. We were also given a supervisor to work with, Mr Amos who could guide us further when developing our web application.

Units: (explained on the slides on the left)

A Nice Time For An App (Digital Design)
Coding the future (Digital Design)
Choices (Math)

ACTION

October:

In October we coded the home page and worked on the front-end design of the website. In addition to further confirming the need of our project, we interviewed Mr.Dudi the dean of studies where he told us there was scope for our project and that both teachers and students could benefit from it. From the needs assessment and our interview we learned a few ways that we could improve our project as well such as adding the option for teachers to upload resources and adding zoom links which we will add as we continue to build our project. This month we also further analysed the needs assessment and the interview from which we learned a few ways that we could improve our project as well such as adding the option for teachers to upload resources and adding zoom links which we will add as we continue to build our project.

November:

In November we first updated our social media account by adding information about our group member Noor. Secondly we also continued to code our website by closing a template we can use to build our website. We also edited our template this month so it was more suited to our project.

December:

During December break we were able to connect with each other using What's app, we also tried to share codes with each other so that we could further continue to build our website.

January:

In January unfortunately two of our group members, Noor and Anahita unfortunately were infected with COVID-19, because of this we were limited this month. However we did continue to code our website by working on the interphase. Lastly we also updated our social media account by making an instagram reel of us working on our project. The instagram reel was able to achieve more than 3500 views and hence was a very good advertisement strategy.

February:

In February we we decided to user Bootstrap to make the website responsive and created 3 interfaces to facilitate the whole process. Finally, we coded the back-end to make sure that the system actually works.

March:

In march we dented our web application by building a booking system and a responsive calendar using databases and php. We also made the booking system and calendar aesthetically pleasing by adding css. We completed our project by finishing the data base, adding images and ccs to better the format and also finishing adding content to the website.

Overall Reflection:

Once we evaluate the need of the project and an overall criteria and plan. We all assigned roles and began programming our web application. To utilise our time to the best of our ability we decided we would use a template from the internet, but we soon realised that this was too complicated and we would not get the results we needed if we did this. To tackle this issue we decided to use Bootstrap as shahim ( back-end developer) explained how he used it in this Digital Design website and how using it would help us all grow in terms of technical skills and it would make our website have responsiveness and an aesthetically pleasing design.

Once we figured out how we were coding our website, we figured the best way to build our website was through the use of 3 total interphases, one for teachers to create meetings to assist students, a student interphase where students can book meeting with teachers and peer, and lastly one for peers to create meetings with students. To do this we needed 3 data bases, one for storing user information and login details, one for storing the meetings that teachers create, and finally one for storing the meetings that peers create ( for evidence refer to Appendix 1)

After building such a plan we distributed the coding, and then combined codes and shared information through google docs, github and what’s app. After this Shahim (back-end developer ) due to the fact that he had all the databases stored in his laptop and had a server, he continued to build the booking system, whereas I built the calendar which would display the meetings and would later be connected with the databases. The other group members worked on the front end during this time which was the aesthetics of the website, pictures and content. The social media team of our group ( Anahita and Eliana) continued to update our progress on our account so we could engage teachers and students into following our project.