(by Adela Bootha and Talhah Patelia)

A big thank you to TADHack, TADHackZA, Alan Quayle and MTNZA for another fantastic Hackathon. Once again we enjoyed the opportunity to learn from the incredible sponsors and to connect with like-minded individuals. This was my third year competing and I have grown tremendously.

Due to Covid19, schools and universities were forced to move to online learning overnight. There are a multitude of platforms being used for online examinations, classes, information and communication with teachers and students, however there isn’t an App that hosts all the above in one single Application.

Furthermore, there are challenges around students cheating in online exams with additional monitors attached to their PCs, while other students are known to pay their friends to write their exams. This is common due to a lack of student identification and monitoring of students during online exams.

Maftuha is a single Application which provides the solution. Maftuha is an Arabic word meaning open, simple and easy to use.

MAFTUHA

How it works:

1) Once the user enters his user name and password, the following screen will appear. The navigation bar on the left displays the different functions of the App. The App is state managed for different users such as teachers, students and administrators who have different access rights. The blue tabs indicate the examinations that the student may access.

The classes tab is used for homework and assignment information.

The Meetings tab would be online classes. Instead on reinventing the wheel, Zoom, Meets or Teams would in incorporated into this tab.

The exams tab is used for online examinations.

The chat tab would be used for all types of school communication (see point 3). Telnyx API was used here.

The storage tab is used for the storage of past examination papers, class recordings and other learning resources with IBM bucket system.

2) As soon as the student clicks on the blue tab to commence an exam, the camera detects his face and proceeds with facial recognition (Tata Consulting Services) to ensure that the correct person is writing the exam.

This feature is necessary since some students were paying their friends to write their online exams. The App correspondingly pulls the student’s screen into a full screen mode to eliminate information from other tabs being accessed.

A phone App was written to allow the student to take pictures of exams that cannot be written on the computer, such as mathematics and chemistry. The image can then be downloaded onto the exam.

3) The chat function facilitates communication between students-teachers, student-student and teacher-teacher. This facility uses sentiment analysis (symbl.ai). Inappropriate language will be flagged by the system enabling the school to eliminate bullying and negative behaviour, which is a problem world-wide.

4) Automatic disciplinary SMS’s will be sent to the student or teacher who elicits negative communication on the chat function. Alternatively, the SMS function may also be used to send general information to students and teachers.

5) The App will hold general information pertaining to students, which could assist with identification (Contactable) of the student as well as student records.

6) With this solution we hope to provide an easy and simple online learning platform which ensures access to education. Look out for the App on the Ayoba platform.

About us:

Talhah Patelia is a 16-year-old self-taught full stack developer and Adela Bootha is his mum. Connect with Talhah on social media @TPatelia & @my3dprint_tp

Below is their winning pitch from TADHack South Africa. Well Done!