Taylors' Teams Success In Worshipful Company of Information Technologists Competition
On Thursday, two teams from our school were invited to present their technological solutions to the problem ‘How can technology make Further and Tertiary Education more effective and accessible?’. The competition final was hosted by the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists at City University.
writes Ali J (5ths)
The team ‘UniBinder’ consisted of Shayan N (L6), Suhan S (L6) and myself, who presented their solution to the problem of note taking and organisation for all students, especially those with Special Educational Needs (SEN). Our app was designed to allow users to take notes on a lecture, while also recording it using the device’s inbuilt microphones. Using this audio, a lecture transcript would be created using OpenAI’s Whisper model, which would be compared to the user’s notes (using the GPT-4o-mini model) to produce a tabulated list of everything the user needs to add. These notes could then be saved to any device’s local filesystem, and categorised using parameters specified during the note’s creation. It was built using React Native (a fully cross-platform JavaScript library) and the Expo Router (an open source platform to extend and modernise the capabilities of React Native) – these were chosen to allow the app to work seamlessly on iOS, Android, and Web platforms, and to allow future extension to Linux, Mac and Windows desktops. The full source code is available at github.com/drnez/unibinder, and is licensed under the strong copyleft GPL v3 open-source license, meaning any program using code from it must also be fully open source.
Team ‘AdaptEd’ was Nahom Y (5ths), Fred B (5ths) and Ansh A (5ths). Their solution to the problem was by presenting a website that offered tailored online courses designed by universities, with the key difference being that each student is helped individually by their own professors and are quizzed by the AI integrated into the website.
Both of the teams presented really well to the judges (one of the judges was the Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists). UniBinder ended up coming 2nd and AdaptEd were awarded the position of runner up. A big thank you to Mr Williams for taking us to the competition!
