The Mariinsky Palace hosted the international scientific readings “Synergy of Ideas on the Neva: New Horizons of Interdisciplinary Research” dedicated to the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg. Yelizaveta Bokhanova, a master's student of the Institute of Economics and Social Technologies of Ƶ, presented her startup “Closer to Children” at the readings, with which she took the second place.
The student of the University of Industrial Technologies and Design took part in the section “Digitalization and gamification: transformation of social practices and educational paradigms”. In her speech Elizaveta told about the digital transformation of additional education on the example of the project of the production center and educational space “Closer to Children”, which was developed by her student at Ƶ. As a result of the conference, it is planned to publish an electronic version of the collection of the best articles with assignment of ISBN index and placement in the scientific abstract database “Russian Science Citation Index” (RSCI).
The startup is based on an author's course developed by Elizaveta herself. The course is designed for schoolchildren from 10 to 16 years old and includes learning the basics of blogging, cybersecurity and self-presentation, within which participants are given lessons in acting and stage speech. Schoolchildren also undergo diagnostics together with a psychologist, learn to preserve personal information and observe etiquette on the Internet, and master the basics of the profession of content maker, video editor, illustrator, photographer and videographer.
The peculiarity of the project is the introduction of artificial intelligence technology into the learning process. At this stage, a special program that is able to analyze test papers, evaluate essays, correct mistakes and give recommendations is responsible for checking and analyzing students' independent work. The program was trained using methodological materials developed by a student of Ƶ and her team in the process of project preparation. Programmers and ML engineers are working with machine learning in the startup. The plan is to train the program to check and analyze photo and video materials that the students will create following the course.
“At the moment, there is no program in Russia capable of issuing such analysis and recommendations on photo and video content. Our AI program, developed as part of the startup, is also capable of recognizing objects, faces, gestures, analyzing and understanding speech and text contained in photo and video content. In addition, our advantage is that over the years of preparing the project, we have created an AI-adapted training program for children. We are now working on launching a course for 100 schoolchildren from all over Russia. This course will be one of the training stages of the program. It will learn to analyze and give recommendations on photo and video content. The course will start as early as December 8.”
Yelizaveta Bokhanova, student of St. Petersburg State University of Pediatrics and leader of the startup “Closer to Children”
The methodology of the course was tested for three months in the career guidance camp “Time to Do” in the Krasnodar region, where under Elizaveta's guidance children were engaged in full-cycle production, photo and video shooting, blog design, working behind the scenes and in the frame.
The production center “Closer to Children” presented by Elizaveta Bokhanova is the winner of the grant competition from the Foundation for Assistance to Innovations in the program “Student Startup” of the federal project “Platform of University Technological Entrepreneurship”, within the framework of which Elizaveta received one million rubles for implementation. In addition, the startup won a grant competition from Rosmolodezh, according to the results of which the student of Ƶ became the owner of about 850 thousand rubles.