Quinto Señorío - Space Apps Challenge

Quinto Señorío| Better Together

Better Together

Your challenge is to create a tool, app, or resource that helps close a gap that causes people to experience inequality. This combination of humanity and technology should eliminate or lessen a systemic issue and educate the user so they can grow.

Apollo: Open Education From Everybody To Anybody

Summary

APOLLO is the integration of new information technologies and their free access resources, applied to the reduction of educational inequalities that humanity has always been facing. The combination of Webapp with a community of people committed to free learning will allow any user with internet access and a desire to learn to be reached, to improve their skills or to solve a problem they face, at the same time that it encourages the generation of new "tutorials" to reach more people; for free, simple and from the most basic level possible to advanced topics on any matter of interest.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Apollo is an open website which allows to create and share tutorials in any language, it integrates new information technologies in order to reduce the education inequalities. According to Nelson Mandela, education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world, however, access is limited due to several socio economic and demographics problems even though the Internet has revolutionized communication and information sources. Our solution is a Web App for a compromised multidisciplinary community with Internet access that desires to learn and teach, this tool pretends to improve people skills and knowledge, as well as, it provides new information to resolve current problems with tutorials created by experts, from the most basic to advanced topics.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16IqcVTdg63HlntJTIB0pqaGQCLeSh1fd?usp=sharing

This link shows the flow chart, a web mockup and the APOLLO´s demo video.

How We Developed This Project

According to the Global Education Monitoring Report 2020 by UNESCO, 40% of poorest countries have problems to support learners and students at risk before and during COVID-19 emergency due to inequality and exclusions issues as poverty, transportation, disability, ethnicity, indigeneity, language, migration, religion and sexual orientation. This sanitary emergency has shown that the education system and methods to learn and teach need to be changed and updated to this new digital era with equal opportunities.

We believe that inequalities represent a development and improving barrier of humanity, restricting several available opportunities to move forwards, for example, quality education access and desinformation gap, even this last one can be more dangerous when people set up paradigms or false beliefs that spread and influence other persons. Facing this problem and the points of view from experiences of the team members, we propose the idea of creating Apollo in order to break with education deficiencies and offer equal opportunities.

We chose to develop a webapp of open access full of “how to make, step by step” tutorials about any topic to any educational level as an applicable solution of disponible resources, Apollo’s community can not only learn and access to tutorials but they can create tutorials with a web developer, programming in a very easy way, a website of expertise topics.

Apollo is based on the Mk materials library of MkDocs, this tool allows editing the material presentation through “markdown” and then, it generates and stores a html file that is translated for obtaining an equivalent file as a programmable website. Website access is through the well-known programming language Javascript. The project implements networking to register users profiles, likewise, the information profile is useful to the website to provide content recommendations and suggestions.

Lack of time is sometimes a limitation to make a perfect job, although until it has been interesting and rewarding to work on a new idea, because within our possibilities, our limited knowledge, and the available resources we could say it is a excellen-firt-step for the future results. A great challenge in our team was to correctly assign individual tasks according to the work profile of each of our members, however the results were quite satisfactory since during the development of the project we managed to work efficiently.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

The European Space Education Resource Office of the European Space Agency (ESA) offers support to the student community of elementary and high school in Europe through formative sessions to respective teachers, using the spatial context in order to related subjects could be more attractive, accessible, dynamic and interactive with the objective of changing the misconception that science is difficult, boring, tedious and only for genius.

On the other hand, Latin American countries usually present social inequalities that trigger that the great part of the population with limited resources do not have access to quality education, this problem generates information gaps and even skills gaps, unfavorable for the poorest people and keeping the education lag.

According to guidelines of ESA classes, Apollo pretends to replicate this kind of teaching and learning model but in its equivalent of webapp with open access where the community is in charge of producing specialized content and then spreading and sharing it. Approaching topics of interest in an easy way, understandable and with the necessary fundamentals, Apollo seeks reduce the learning lag between user-expert, producing enough confidence and encouragement to put into practice the tutorials information.

Amazon Web Services allows you to expand the scope of the project by taking advantage of its tools such as its database to manage user information, scale the infrastructure of APOLLO using the elastic properties of AWS and implement data analysis tools to constantly improve the content and all suggestions of the platform.