Team South Fayette - Stacks

This project focused on moving away from the method of education where students get trapped in one topic or subject area even before reaching college and supporting student decisions. Our goal is to increase student autonomy and internal motivation to help them find the best path forward for their future, whether that be college or straight into the job force. My team used rapid prototyping to create an AI-powered recommendation system to highlight interesting opportunities for students which we named Stacks.

We worked with different stakeholders including parents, students, teachers, and administrators. Our research focused on what students need to succeed and how other stakeholders help provide those things. We utilized many different types of user research including:

• Wizard of Oz studies
• Cardboard prototyping
• One-on-one interviews
• Focus groups

The information that we gathered was used to create the design and the functionality of the software. We used rapid prototyping to create and test many different ideas and capabilities. Feedback from each iteration was used to improve and direct the final version of Stacks.

Stacks is a proposed software that helps students understand the options before them and what they may be interested in. It utilizes AI to create personalized recommendations based on previous experiences and performances. Students would be able to track previous class and experiences as well as discover new opportunities. Teachers would be able to create new opportunities and suggest experiences to students. Parents would get access to a dashboard highlighting their student’s progress and interests, while limited to protect student privacy. This video demonstrates some of the basic functionality that a student would have access to.