Nodes project /Tunisia eLearning Hackathon

3:49 PM Unknown 0 Comments

As the world need more technology to help students and teachers fulfill their objectives ,E-learning is essentials ,furthermore e-learning website and platforms are progressing very fast but they don't consider the importance of how student sees the information ,how he understand it and what is the differences between the pedagogical approaches,as some learn better by reading , other by visual interpretations , the need to centralize all the pedagogy into one effective system is important. ,with new technologies see the dawn ,like IOT and the virtual reality they are progressing and seem really in heat right now, we thought of them to fulfill our needs, so the main idea in our project is to make a virtual-real classroom ,where people can read, see and hear .

The real power of interactive technologies is that they let us learn in ways that aren’t otherwise possible or practical. - David Lassner. for that

What is Nodes project ?!

A new way of learning , an open source ,Hardware platform based on VR technology for everyone That make E-learning a living experience for all in very fun and astonishing style.As if he was in a real classroom ,with virtual reality technology,and through the Holograms for scientific experiences , project and can give a nice and fulfilling interpretations of experiences like chemical reactions and circuits manipulation for students and also help teachers and entity's that can't afford some expensive materials to at least give their students the opportunities to see those experiences .

The core idea of the project is to make the virtual technology accessible for everyone to help students ,instructors and even professional to understand more the facts.The project is spat into 4 parts which are merged to one main idea to make the science more interactive .

Virtual reality headset : One important way VR headsets can increase immersion is to increase the field of view . how wide the picture is. A 360-degree display would be too expensive and unnecessary .

Hologram :The traditional projector are not interactive but with the hologram, we can turn the displaying of information more interactive with 3D picture and dynamic view ,which helps teachers to explain more the facts .In additional the VR headset is only limited for one individual otherwise hologram will be a good choice in the class .
IOT : Blocks board is a platform of easy-to-use electronic building blocks that empower you to invent anything, from your own remote controlled car, to a smart home device. The blocks snap together with magnets, no soldering, no wiring, no programming needed.
Cross platform : its web application for technical(contributors ,makers ,teachers, and students) ,and nontechnical users(Artist ) to share and write their own tutorials and a store for the developers to create 3D applications for VR or 360 videos .Also ,to download the apk files to run the apps for the VR headset and download the 360° videos for the Hologram projector .

What we did ?!

Blocks board

We have used a hand made prototyping board based on Microchip pic18F4550 with Pinguino firmware ,the circuit was built before the contest ,but ,we have fixed some wires and problems that we have faced on the board .The other blocks are LED block, RGB LED block ,Relay block ,also another simple blocks to control things through IR remote using TSOP1738.
Here are the screenshots of one of the blocks with both boards Pinguino and Arduino .

Led in action

Two board and one block

2. VR Headset

We have tested a real VR headset (Oculus Rift) ,the experience was great ,but, even that the VR is not too much expensive ,the price still not accessible for everyone so we though making the google cardboard project which is very cheap and anyone can build it at home !! with a real good experience .
here are screenshots of the assembly process

3. Hologram 3D mobile projector

People think to create a hologram is really a difficult task but in fact, it's really an easy task as all you need is your i-pad and some plastic sheet Print out the template on a piece of paper

Print out the template on a piece of paper

Trace out the shape on the plastic sheet using a ruler and pen. For the trapezoid template, trace out four similar outlines on the plastic sheet. Now carefully cut out the outlines with a cutting blade and ruler. Try to achieve the cuts as precisely as possible for a perfect pyramid.and then you get this

[Here are our screenshot]

the pyramid is fixed on the tablet

And then we covered the system with the box to decrease the lights out and to get an HD picture :D !

and then all you need is to find a hologram video on youtube, for example, this one

We have provided educational videos such as Solar system ,real human Heart and some fish used for natural science .
Here are screenshots of the final results
Human Heart

Solar system

4. Web platform

Our web platform was the central nodes where you can get anything ,as teachers and the community can add tutorials and articles , lessons and 360° videos to help others learn and scalp there skills we needed a platform to centralise all of that, so we need a strong solid platform for all of that and how lucky we are to find an open source strong platform that can fully be customised for our needs with that we can work on the norms faster thanks to open source community . We wrote some articles to improve the power of the web community application .
Here are the screenshots
Homepage {As you can see the design is friendly and the web app is easy to use }

Create Tutorials page

Example of article

5. Nodes VR android application

The VR headset needs a 360-degree video to show the application with 3D interactive way ,and our idea was to show up what is going inside the human body using the VR feature ,another wise seeking for the other application we have created our app that facilitates the access to a bunch of educational videos .Nodes VR was live during the challenge and uploaded to playStore ,the key feature of the application that is a human-friendly interface ,which is easy and fast .

All the videos are interactive .

24 h of hacking NON-STOP !

The hackathon was a great moment to share knowledge and meets people ,the experience we got was astonishing with the new people we met ,the great network we forged and the idea sharing was really overwhelming .
After 24 h ,giving a pitch front of the judge to present our work .You can find out the ppt file from this link [click]

Our Team

Award !

When it comes to the level of intelligence different chatbots currently hold, there is a wide variety of them available in currently in the market. Chatbots are either rule-based or the ones that are truly based on machine learning. We are a team of 2 Tunisian IT students and we designed an Artificial Intelligent Assistant called 'Kara', who recognizes people talking to it, answer questions, tweet and facebook for users by vocal commands and Collect information, searches Facebook and chats instead of users on demand and chats with you and its funny there are more cool features that we are working on.

What is KARA ?

Chat-bots seem to be climbing the proverbial peak of the tech hype curve with every passing day. Popular messaging apps have been attempting to outdo each other in terms of making their platforms open for bot development. Businesses are also rushing to embrace them, And its Just like real humans but better, here is an overview of the project and what we did so far our long-term goal is to create a web-based bot that could adapt itself according to the user's needs. Like learning what the user needs by talking . for example, if a user wants the robot to learn that he has important things to remember he will say : Kara remind me to go to the doctor at 7 pm and it will add the appointment to your calendar . The first prototype was just an overview of the project to see haw things could work

After some work included some new features and vocal control responses as following

What is Patricia ?!

Patricia is a conversational agent designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via facebook , it can understand several languages such as Arabic ,Russian-Japanese and so on ,enjoy endless funny conversations with Patricia ! hopefully, it learns from you.However, The project is still in beta version ,we have launched the Bot to some users [our friends and their friends] ,the bot has reached more than 30 talks with real users and it behaves very good ,even some users have shared their experience with it.we are looking to make it with full control on here facebook profile ,such as accepting friend request ,post things on here wall ,and make decisions to improve the power of the Artificial intelligence .

here is a real conversation with the bot :D ! Cute isn't ! I can't be here boyfriend :p !

Can we predict human behavior ?

Machines are able to analyze data, but humans are typically required to choose which data points are relevant for analysis. In three competitions with human teams, a machine made more accurate predictions than 615 of 906 human teams. And while humans worked on their predictive algorithms for months, the machine took two to 12 hours to produce each of its competition entries.Through this few days the Bot has learned a lot from people and get their behaviors to get out an image that looks like human and even think like them ,Humans can't get the real difference after talking a while with the machine ,they can't believe that the other side of the conversation is just an Algorithm that analyzes the data and makes connection with a huge database to reach every word and expression ,but ,on the other side ,we can note that we are more comfortable and honest to talk freely with thing that acts like anything else ! and accept us as we are ,therefore,we see that some people showing human feelings to the robot such as empathy ,love, and humor .some people even believe they feel more comfortable to talking with a robot than a stranger due to its smart responses .

Assistant Bots and Internet of things ?

The main idea of the Internet of things is to change the way of communication from Human to Human affair to Machine to Machine communication ,which computers are able to sense the environment around it through a bunch of sensors and analyse this huge number of data connects to the internet to share their experience with other nodes [computers ] ,In this case ,Smart bots will change the way of using our computers and interact more with technology .

Contact us

We exploit the technology and we relate things to brings out our ideas !
The team developers of the project are :
Iheb ben Salem : Patricia chatBot [email ] : ihebbensalem@mail.com
Med Iheb Bousandel : Kara [email ] : bmiheb@gmailcom

Do you have some old hardware collecting dust in the basement, attic, or garage? Don’t let it go to waste just because it’s not powerful enough to run modern operating systems. Windows 8 may be lighter than Windows Vista, but it’s nowhere near as lightweight as these free Linux distributions. If you have an old Windows XP PC or a netbook, you can revive it with a lightweight Linux system.

All of these Linux distributions can run from a live USB drive, so you could even boot them directly from a USB drive. This may be faster than installing them to the computer’s slow, aging hard drive.

1. TinyCore

A Micro Core Linux as it’s developers say, Tiny core ISO file size is only 12MB and it comes with FLTK/FKWM and BusyBox desktop by default, of course many things are removed from this distribution like many hardware drivers but you can install them later if you want, it runs completely on memory which makes it very fast in fact, it was forked from Damn Small project but right now it is an independent Linux distribution.
Download os http://tinycorelinux.net/