QTopia
QTopia was a product of my final year computer science capstone project. The main purpose of it is to provide a tool to aggregate questions, which can be used in classroom or conference settings. It consists of a backend, which uses natural language processing to group similar questions together based on their content, as well as a frontend which enables teachers and students to interact with the app.
The app was primarily coded using Haskell and Python in the back-end, and Elm in the front-end.
Many thanks to Carolina and Drew, who worked together with me on this project! If you would like more information, you can have a look at the final POSTER, or you can give the algorithm a shot HERE!
Technical Description
Current trends in technology and pedagogy have pushed institutions within higher education to adopt new methods, emphasizing personalizedteaching and learning. Traditional lectures have been replacedbyflipped classrooms, where pre-recorded lectures are assigned to students as homework, leaving class time open for collaborative learning. However,studies have found that presentation slides accompanying pre-recorded lectures often do not contain enough information to satisfy the individual needs of the students. In a traditional lecture misleadingslides can be mended through class discussions originating from student inquiries. To facilitate both participation within traditional lectures and inquiry formulation throughout pre-recorded lectures, we propose a novel application.
Through our application, students can input questions at any point during lecture and rank their peers’ questions based on perceived importance. The collected questions are then clustered into sets of related groups, in order to decrease redundancy and gain higher insight into the students’ learning patterns. The input is first quantified through several natural language processing techniques and then a set of groups isgenerated using an unsupervised machine learning algorithm. For a visual scheme of the application, refer to the Figure 1. This organizational system can help mitigate the negative effects of large classroom sizes on the instructor’s ability to answer a large number questions. It also allows the students to anonymously participate in class discussion within a traditional lecture, and to ask questions to an instructor throughout pre-recorded lectures.