An educational site written in Python (from YCombinator's RFS)

[Cai Gengyang]

My "vision" if you will for this site is one which should have these basic functionalities :

1) A forum for students , educators, parents and lawyers to post and discuss issues about education, fees, admissions process , visa issues.

2) A search engine for users to well (search for stuff lol)

2) Puzzles , Quizzes, Games and Tests in various topics. (Make it dynamic, animated and really interesting , I mean, I really love math, physics and engineering but a lot of lecturers are just fucking boring to listen to if you know what I mean. (makes you feel like you want to punch something. It would be great if every lecturer and professor in the world was as eloquent as Christopher Hitchens or as funny as Bill Maher, but especially in the hard sciences and math, alot of the lecturers are extremely smart but also very boring to listen to.

3) A live online discussion forum where users can discuss and chat see each other in real-time with a live video thingy (i don't know what its called) with some translator to help translate foreign accents and help users from different countries communicate properly. Imagine you are a poor genius amateur mathematician from Sudan who has just found a partial proof to the Riemann Hypothesis and you want to discuss it live in person over the internet with other math enthusiasts but can't speak English. A live translator that translates what you are speaking in real-time (if such a thing were possible, I have no idea) would be a good idea to create

4) A system to help parents connect with tutors whom they want to hire for their kids. I have no idea what the tutoring industry is like in other countries , but its a huge industry in Singapore with its super "kiasu" parents). There are already several such sites available, but I guess I could clone them and build them with different design (there can be infinite types of design, so its not like a zero-sum game). Especially as the population grows , there's likely to be more demand for these kind of sites and services. Alot of websites have very poor generic design and are unappealing to look at. 

edx.org is a great example , perhaps a competitor / clone with different functionalities and better design , more videos, graphics , more interactive 







On Wednesday, May 11, 2016 at 3:07:17 AM UTC+8, DFS wrote:
> On 5/10/2016 2:13 AM, Cai Gengyang wrote:
> > Ok, so after reading YCombinator's RFS, I have decided that I want to
> > work on this :
> >
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >  EDUCATION
> >
> > If we can fix education, we can eventually do everything else on this
> > list. The first attempts to use technology to fix education have
> > focused on using the Internet to distribute traditional content to a
> > wider audience. This is good, but the Internet is a fundamentally
> > different medium and capable of much more.
> >
> > Solutions that combine the mass scale of technology with one-on-one
> > in-person interaction are particularly interesting to us.
> 
> one room, one teacher, one student, and one web browser?
> 
> 
> 
> > This may not require a "breakthrough" technology in the classical
> > sense, but at a minimum it will require very new ways of doing
> > things.
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >  I want to create such a site using Python. What are the various
> > steps I need to take to create such a site ? This is a big project,
> > but one that is worth doing ... Any suggestions / help appreciated ?
> > Thanks alot
> 
> 
> When you say 'such a site' what do you envision?