Preliminary Idea Guide

Introduction

For week 1, you will try and brainstorm a few ideas for your team's project. This document will help you figure out what we'll allow for the project and what we won't allow.

At the end of today's class, your instructor will submit the ideas so far into this form. After we receive the submission, we'll give feedback to you and your instructor. The next time you meet, you'll decide on a final project idea and lock it in.

The form itself is quite simple. In the form, you will be asked to submit at least 1 idea. You do not have to give a fully detailed description for each idea. However, the following 3 points must be addressed for each idea:

1. What is an issue you want to fix?

Your idea should focus primarily on social impact -- the positive change it brings to your community. Consider projects about volunteering, recycling, learning valuable skills, or making tasks easier. Projects purely for entertainment or personal enjoyment aren't bad, but won't do well in this competition.

Think about your hobbies and what matters to you. For each of those hobbies, think about barriers to entry or ways to make the hobby easier. If you like cooking, for example, working class people may not know how to cook, don't have time to learn, and may not have a lot in grocery money. As such, they might rely on unhealthy fast food.

2. What is your project idea and how will it fix it?

Describe your project and how it will address the problem you identified. Who will use your project? How are they going to use it? Going off of our cooking example, our project could let a user select their requested budget, cooking time, difficulty, and kind of cuisine, and an AI will generate a recipe for them.

Your project can be a video game, but only if it is educational and primarily targets schoolchildren. Games that aren't educational don't have any social impact.

Note that your idea must fill these requirements:

It must be possible to make as a website
It cannot require hardware (like special sensors or gadgets) to work
It cannot require a database or an account to use

3. Why is using AI necessary to solve this problem?

This is a competition all centered around AI, so this is an especially important question. AI must be so important to your project that it would be much harder to make without it.

For our cooking example, an AI can instantly generate recipes based on user preferences with minimal setup. Without AI, we would need to manually find maybe hundreds of recipes and build a system to recommend the right one for certain options. Technically, it's possible, but it requires more time, more effort, and wouldn't even work as well.

Examples

This idea works, because it identifies a clear problem and comes up with a solution that relies on AI.

Students in elementary schools need special attention to make sure they understand big ideas. Teachers might be too busy to give personalized attention to every student. Student grades may suffer.
Kids can enter in math equations into an educational assistant website and it will guide the students into solving the question. It will then come up with more practice problems personalized to what the students get right and wrong.
We will use generative AI to come up with the questions, as well as understand the user's question and their answer to generate personalized advice and more practice.

This idea also works because it identifies a clear problem and tries to fix it with AI-generated content.