Education bot
Did you know that 258 million kids don’t have a proper education? That’s more than 8% of kids in the world! Yet education is still declared a right by UNESCO.
According to Our World In Numbers, from 1997 to 2007 we made massive progress, decreasing the number of kids who are not enrolled in school by more than 40%!
From 2007 to 2021 we have not seen much progress, and that is not an option if we want to reach our 4th SDG goal “Quality Education For All” by 2030. So how can we change this?
“Don’t confuse schooling with education. I didn’t go to Harvard but, the people who work for me did” -Elon Musk
When I heard this quote at first I was really confused. My whole life I always thought education and schooling were the same things, so I did what any kid now days would do, I googled it.
“Education: Knowledge acquired by formal learning and instruction. Schooling: The process of being formally educated in a school”
After reading this everything clicked. I always had a passion for education and making it accessible to everyone but never knew how.
The only solution that was currently available was building schools where ever needed. Although that would solve a lot of problems, one problem remains. Money. It can cost upward of 15 thousand dollars to build one school. We would need Elon Musk to fund it, and I don’t think that’s going to happen.
After brainstorming I had an idea. Why can’t we make little devices that can travel with kids and help them learn without having to go to a school, and so I made the Education bot.
The Education bot allows kids who don’t have access to schools to learn by themselves whether there are on a farm or the street or practically anywhere. All you have to do is ask it a question and it will answer.
The Future Of The Education Bot
The education bot is not supposed to be a permanent fix. We all know that schools are way better at educating kids but they cost a lot and can take up to 10 years to build. The education bot can be implemented in those 10 years so kids can still learn while they wait.
In the future, we could even partner with the NBA. The NBA is opening a basketball league in Africa, They are also trying to educate kids in Africa. The NBA could use the Education Bot and give it to kids who don’t have access to schools or education. Remember the Education Bot can be programmed with anything ranging from learning the English language to how to play basketball
Now let’s take a closer look at how I build this in python.
For this project, I only needed two modules, which are Pyttsx3 and speech_recognition. Speech_recognition is to recognize the user’s voice. Pyttsx3 or python text to speech is how the bot responds.
This next part is establishing the variables and asking “how can I help.”
After that, you can see speech recognition using the microphone to capture what the user is saying. Next, it just making that a variable and prints what the person said.
Lastly, you can see a long list of different scenarios, for example, if the user says “what is addition”, then the bot will say “Addition is putting two numbers together to make a bigger number. Example 2 plus 2 equals 4.”
What I have learned through this process
Building this project was a lot of fun, but I did encounter a couple of struggles. First of I feel like I have learned so much more about it. For example, before I did this project I had little understanding of how to use modules. Now I feel way more comfortable using modules that I had never seen or just recently looked at. Although while coding I did have some struggles. For example, when I was trying to get speech recognition to assess my mic, it just was not working. I was lucky because someone on StackOverflow (aka the best website ever) posted something that solved my problem perfectly.
So there you go that my experience building the Education bot. Down below is a video explaining all of this.
