Our team consists of the following 4 students: Alexey Mitko, Rachael Norton, Pooja Popat, Qi qi Wang. In February 2010, during one of our courses at University of Sydney we were asked to come up with an idea for a new business. This video is the first submission that we made, it's purpose is to capture the attention of potential investors. This video is flashy and will get you excited, but lucks a lot of detail that we developed later on as semester progressed.
So what is Brain-E?
After hours of research and just general pondering, we realized that something was missing in the life of an average university student. After all, our social lives are organized by websites like Facebook, while our academic records and lecture times are held by the likes of Blackboard. However time management for a student is still a matter of great effort. With invitations to attend parties flowing from Facebook and with an array of assignments, deadlines and work obligations only students with great time management skills and good foresight are able to structure their time in a way to minimize the stress of university life. They do it by meticulously documenting their lectures, study sessions and upcoming assignments in their little personal diaries or on usual online calendars. The question that bugged us about the current state of affairs was "Why?".
Why do students need to schedule blocks of time for study themselves? After all we can probably estimate a number of hours a student needs to write a 10 page assignment, or read 20 pages from a book. If we know how many hours it takes for a student to complete those tasks we can teach the calendar to schedule those events for the student around preexisting lectures and in accordance with student's preferences.
Why do students need to pull all nighters? Students have plenty of time on their hands, unfortunately most have a limited foresight of 1-2 weeks and don't realize that a huge paper is coming their way until it's a bit too late. They could've done this paper bit by bit in the previous 2-3 weeks, but now they will have to jam it into 1 week. To most students this sounds familiar, but I know some students who were able to avoid it by planning their time carefully. Other students (including myself) just cannot spare the effort to keep those kind of study plans. But why do we have to? If we know that a paper is due at the end of semester and we know how fast we work, then can't we just put this information into Brain-E and let it spread the work for us over the course of the semester?
Why do we have to reschedule? If I decide to go to my friend's birthday or go on a weekend trip, then can I tell Brain-E about my plans and it can reschedule all the study sessions for later, or warn me if the workload will become a bit heavy as result of me skipping couple days of study.
I hope you already get the idea of Brain-E. Brain-E is an online calendar that makes time management decisions faced by students for them and presents a comprehensive long-term schedule that balances university work with social life.
The potential of the idea is pretty big. You can make Brain-E synchronize with Facebook for social events and Blackboard for academic assignments. An iPhone app can help remind student of upcoming study sessions and events. However all this is in the future, right now we need to concentrate on create a simple prototype without any synchronization functions to see if students really like it.
I really hope that we can make lives of students all over the world easier and more enjoyable. In the following couple of days I will be putting additional information and explanation of benefits in targeting student market, what we hope to achieve from this project and our involvement on Source Forge, quick bios of our team members, and all other tasty research that we compiled this semester.
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This section contains the description of the Brain-E Idea
Our team consists of the following 4 students: Alexey Mitko, Rachael Norton, Pooja Popat, Qi qi Wang. In February 2010, during one of our courses at University of Sydney we were asked to come up with an idea for a new business. This video is the first submission that we made, it's purpose is to capture the attention of potential investors. This video is flashy and will get you excited, but lucks a lot of detail that we developed later on as semester progressed.
The video itself can be found here
So what is Brain-E?
After hours of research and just general pondering, we realized that something was missing in the life of an average university student. After all, our social lives are organized by websites like Facebook, while our academic records and lecture times are held by the likes of Blackboard. However time management for a student is still a matter of great effort. With invitations to attend parties flowing from Facebook and with an array of assignments, deadlines and work obligations only students with great time management skills and good foresight are able to structure their time in a way to minimize the stress of university life. They do it by meticulously documenting their lectures, study sessions and upcoming assignments in their little personal diaries or on usual online calendars. The question that bugged us about the current state of affairs was "Why?".
Why do students need to schedule blocks of time for study themselves? After all we can probably estimate a number of hours a student needs to write a 10 page assignment, or read 20 pages from a book. If we know how many hours it takes for a student to complete those tasks we can teach the calendar to schedule those events for the student around preexisting lectures and in accordance with student's preferences.
Why do students need to pull all nighters? Students have plenty of time on their hands, unfortunately most have a limited foresight of 1-2 weeks and don't realize that a huge paper is coming their way until it's a bit too late. They could've done this paper bit by bit in the previous 2-3 weeks, but now they will have to jam it into 1 week. To most students this sounds familiar, but I know some students who were able to avoid it by planning their time carefully. Other students (including myself) just cannot spare the effort to keep those kind of study plans. But why do we have to? If we know that a paper is due at the end of semester and we know how fast we work, then can't we just put this information into Brain-E and let it spread the work for us over the course of the semester?
Why do we have to reschedule? If I decide to go to my friend's birthday or go on a weekend trip, then can I tell Brain-E about my plans and it can reschedule all the study sessions for later, or warn me if the workload will become a bit heavy as result of me skipping couple days of study.
I hope you already get the idea of Brain-E. Brain-E is an online calendar that makes time management decisions faced by students for them and presents a comprehensive long-term schedule that balances university work with social life.
The potential of the idea is pretty big. You can make Brain-E synchronize with Facebook for social events and Blackboard for academic assignments. An iPhone app can help remind student of upcoming study sessions and events. However all this is in the future, right now we need to concentrate on create a simple prototype without any synchronization functions to see if students really like it.
I really hope that we can make lives of students all over the world easier and more enjoyable. In the following couple of days I will be putting additional information and explanation of benefits in targeting student market, what we hope to achieve from this project and our involvement on Source Forge, quick bios of our team members, and all other tasty research that we compiled this semester.