Learn from Map- Making learning social with facebook and foursquare

[Abhijeet Mohan]

Hello Sir,

I am 3rd year engineering student. I have experience with many mobile application platforms(Android,Windows Phone,Qt,HTML5,JQueryMobile).

Apart from this, i have been working with facebook apis (since 18 months) and foursquare apis.

I believe learning will be more fun for kids if we make it social.They will love to learn with friends/groups.

And also understand where to apply that knowledge. The idea is to make learning familiar and practical.

With the above idea, we can add following features to learn the Map: 

-A puzzle to arrange facebook friends on the map in form of pins.(We can make it interesting by asking them to pin their favorite celebrity.)

-Asking state,current city or hometown name by displaying friend's pictures.

-Asking to pin the venues around them like hotels,malls,etc. (Will help them discover new places around them)

-Making them learn the 'directions' of common places they visit like school,coaching,etc.(Can help them when they are lost)

I would also like to mention, most of my projects were lightweight clients and core logic was at backend/server-side.

Precisely, they were just interface for the backend. Being a web/mobile backend developer i can also code REST framework over these(fb,foursquare,google places) apis.

Which can be used by other modules/apps of our project like 'Label the Diagram','Practice Handwriting',etc.

If you find my ideas worth implementing,i would love to contribute to BuildmLearn. :)

[Manu Kothari]

I'm wondering whether primary science kids will be on Facebook. Considering the growth of IT sector they might actually be.

[Rahul Ahuja]

Hi Abhijeet,

 

I believe learning will be more fun for kids if we make it social.They will love to learn with friends/groups.

And also understand where to apply that knowledge. The idea is to make learning familiar and practical.

I think it's an interesting approach however you may have to be careful with scenarios you implement.

 

With the above idea, we can add following features to learn the Map: 

-A puzzle to arrange facebook friends on the map in form of pins.(We can make it interesting by asking them to pin their favorite celebrity.)

-Asking state,current city or hometown name by displaying friend's pictures.

For example, kids in schools may only have friends in their hometown.

 

-Asking to pin the venues around them like hotels,malls,etc. (Will help them discover new places around them) 

-Making them learn the 'directions' of common places they visit like school,coaching,etc.(Can help them when they are lost)

This would teach them about their city and neighbourhood. The original idea was to teach geography.

 

If you find my ideas worth implementing,i would love to contribute to BuildmLearn. :)

So again, social networking is an interesting add on to the app, but first you need to get a basic app in place. May be you should focus on that to start with.

[Abhijeet Mohan]

I think it's an interesting approach however you may have to be careful with scenarios you implement.

Thank you for finding it interesting. :)

For example, kids in schools may only have friends in their hometown.

Yeah, i agree to it.

Actually, i misunderstood that the our target audience are kids

in primary school 'only'.

This would teach them about their city and neighbourhood. The original idea was to teach geography.

I was trying to make learning practical.Like teaching kids that how can they APPLY their knowledge of  geography in real life.

But i will follow your suggestion of implementing basic app first and then try these stuffs.

So again, social networking is an interesting add on to the app, but first you need to get a basic app in place. 
May be you should focus on that to start with.

So, will follow your suggestions and integrate social networking into

the basic app features(if-needed).

Can you please guide me, from where should i start?

Should i code quick working prototype of what i am thinking and show it

OR Collect all my ideas and submit it in proposal(after discussing them in the group of course).

[Rahul Ahuja]

Should i code quick working prototype of what i am thinking and show it

OR Collect all my ideas and submit it in proposal(after discussing them in the group of course).

You may not begin coding until you are selected. You should collect your ideas, discuss it here and then submit your development approach in the proposal. 

[Abhijeet Mohan]

Hello Sir,

Following your suggestion of integrating social networking in the 'basic app' , I have come up with this.

We can have a quiz in which the recent news is displayed to the user and we can ask them to pin the location on map where that news/event took place.

Eg. News- India will be taking on sri lanka in the finals. Now user has to pin the location on the map where finals are played.

I know this may cause ambiguity, but we can rectify that by giving hints,small description, or giving two news of same location. eg. description - the city is known for bollywood. hint- hometown of Sachin Tendulkar.

So by the above parameters we can monitor the hardness of the quiz. This will also enhance the  G.K of kids.

Please give your feedback on this.

[Pankaj Nathani]

 

We can have a quiz in which the recent news is displayed to the user and we can ask them to pin the location on map where that news/event took place.

Eg. News- India will be taking on sri lanka in the finals. Now user has to pin the location on the map where finals are played.

I know this may cause ambiguity, but we can rectify that by giving hints,small description, or giving two news of same location. eg. description - the city is known for bollywood. hint- hometown of Sachin Tendulkar.

I think using dynamic sources for questions is a good idea. What would be your source of this news?

[Abhijeet Mohan]

I think using dynamic sources for questions is a good idea.

Thanks for finding it worth.

What would be your source of this news?

We have web services which return news based on location like Google News, Yahoo News.(There are others too but not open-source.)

We can fetch descriptions and hints of the places from wikipedia. 

 

Here is the short use case of what i am thinking

User can select any country in a drop down whose questions he likes to answer.(By default his own country)

A sqlite table will contain cities and their location corresponding to every country in the dropdown.

As user starts the quiz, a random city is retrieved from the table corresponding to selected country.

News of that city is retrieved from api and displayed to user.(with description and hints)

User is supposed to pin the location of news on the map.

If the location(approx) on map matches location in table , then the answer is correct otherwise wrong.

Please give your suggestion on this.

[Pankaj Nathani]

Hi Abhijeet,

 

As user starts the quiz, a random city is retrieved from the table corresponding to selected country.

News of that city is retrieved from api and displayed to user.(with description and hints)

User is supposed to pin the location of news on the map.

It's an interesting idea.. though it lacks details. For example, would all news entries be associated with a location. Also, sometimes there might be multiple locations associated with a piece of news, how would you handle these? What if the kid doesn't like news, many kids don't!

[Abhijeet Mohan]

Hello Sir,

would all news entries be associated with a location.

I am not searching news on the basis of locations associated with them. Instead i am searching for news of a particular location.

eq. If user selects US as his country. And city NY is chosen randomly from database(sqlite). Then i will search news in NY and will show it to user, and the answer for the question will be NY. Similar for other cities too.

sometimes there might be multiple locations associated with a piece of news, how would you handle these? 

For this i have decided to add feature of descriptions and hints. The descriptions will give some more information about the place of the question. 

What if the kid doesn't like news, many kids don't!

 Yeah that is right. So we can solve this problem by integrating interests feature.User will select some interests and he will be provided news in questions based on those interests.  The interests can be sports, music,movies, etc. Also, for keeping it simple we can select some common interests(i.e done by the application) that is trending among kids of that age group and providing news from those interests.

Please suggest what changes do you want me to make?

[Pankaj Nathani]

 

I am not searching news on the basis of locations associated with them. Instead i am searching for news of a particular location. 

eq. If user selects US as his country. And city NY is chosen randomly from database(sqlite). Then i will search news in NY and will show it to user, and the answer for the question will be NY. Similar for other cities too.

Ok that's fine.

Please suggest what changes do you want me to make?

I think you've formulated a fairly good concept, you may now work on your proposal then. Some guidelines for how to write the proposal on this page: https://github.com/BuildmLearn/BuildmLearn-Toolkit/wiki/Guidance-for-Students 

[Abhijeet Mohan]

I think you've formulated a fairly good concept, you may now work on your proposal then.

Thanks a lot and i have started working on it. Will ask for your review in sometime.

Now as basic working of the app is decided. I was thinking about "how can we give user the personalized experience?" the AI thing. And i landed on this:

We can add these features to the app with the help of facebook:

-getting the name of the cities in which user's friends live in, and displaying news of those. (The reason being user may have existing knowledge of the city, or may want to have more knowledge about them. All in all increasing the user's interest in the quiz.)

-publishing quiz scores on the timeline. (for publicity of the app)

Please give your feedback on this!

[Pankaj Nathani]

Hi Abhijeet 

 

We can add these features to the app with the help of facebook:

-getting the name of the cities in which user's friends live in, and displaying news of those. (The reason being user may have existing knowledge of the city, or may want to have more knowledge about them. All in all increasing the user's interest in the quiz.)

-publishing quiz scores on the timeline. (for publicity of the app)

I think this is a 'good to have' feature but may not be absolutely necessary. Remember the target audience are school children (10-14 years aged) so they may not have many friends living in other cities. Also, they may not be on Facebook at all (or they may?)

So upshot is that you may propose to add the facebook integration, but don't keep it mandatory. Also, prioritise other functionality of the app and overall UX before adding facebook integration.. is what I would suggest. Hope that makes sense.

Thanks a lot and i have started working on it. Will ask for your review in sometime.

Great, looking forward to your draft proposal :)