Please describe your proposed solution.

In a very straightforward explanation, what we want to do is:

• Betting on quizzes
• Build a pretty & easy tool for massive adoption of non-crypto users
• Paying content creators for their work

However, the most relevant goal we can achieve is from the perspective of e-learning. Currently, there is no method for detecting accurately the user knowledge using multiple choices.

MCQ (multiple choices question) is a powerful tool when you want to automatically "filter" for a certain degree of student knowledge (in order to be focused only on who passed a certain threshold). However, for a proper evaluation, an "essay question" is still needed, which is impossible to automate (yes, AI is not yet that powerful).

So, how can we more accurately evaluate still using an MCQ approach?

The solution comes from this white paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242679731_Evidential_Multiple_Choice_Questions (and related great researchers Javier Diaz, Maria Rifqi, Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier) that describes Evidential Multiple Choice Question (Ev-MCQ).

Yes, the Cardano community is used to develop products based on research and white paper!

With Ev-MCQ the student answer in an imprecise way, setting the confidence of the correctness for each answer, providing extra valuable information for its evaluation (to process automatically by an AI, yes in this case it can).

Here, the confidence of the user is challenged by the betting process for each answer (if students really don't want to lose money they have to seriously study).

This proposal is looking for support to build BOUNDER, Bet On UNDERstanding, and it will be open source.

BOUNDER is not only fun and economically sustainable for stakeholders involved, but it is also extremely relevant for teaching purposes.

BOUNDER is a fundamental module of a bigger decentralised e-Learning platform we are building through our dedicated e-Learning DAO.

To have a more visual understanding of how it works, look at this wireframe.

A student is asked to bet a certain amount of ADA from a budget received at the start of the assessment. Note that this budget is not paid by this user, it is the potential winning to be received at the end of the assessment phase. This is a "earn to learn" technique, able to promote learning and receiving payment for deserving students. Earn to learn, is extremely valuable in developing countries, where salaries are low and students need support.

However, the evaluated student can ends up consuming all the available budget with bad answers.

If the student does not know the answer, he/she may skip the assessment going to the next Ev-MCQ, paying an ADA little fee as a penalty.

The student can ask for hints for a correct answer in exchange for payment of extra ADA.

All of these ADA are deduced from the available budget, but when it is consumed the student may top-up ADA to continue with the examination. This is how BOUNDER may become lucrative and sustainable.

So, BOUNDER allows the student to save the budget from wrong bets and cashout at the end of the evaluation.

The lost ADAs due to wrong answers will be sent to the evaluators that created the Ev-MCQ. The goal of the evaluator is to provide non-trivial Ev-MCQ, in order to cash out at the end of every examination process, but also not even create impossible questions, otherwise, the student will always skip the assessment, not betting.

The initial budget can come from different sources: patrons, sponsors, employers, parents, and students financially independent.

BOUNDER will improve the quality of knowledge verification, and it will be also fun for many, whereas for someone will be an opportunity.

BOUNDER is an autonomous component that can be implemented and published by itself, however, it is also designed to be one of the main components of a decentralised e-Learning we are building.

Both are under the management and control of the e-Learning DAO

Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

Today centralised e-Learning platforms monopoly the market, but this proposal has a monetizing impact on an entirely new ecosystem.

BOUNDER will be built through e-Learning DAO, an up-and-running Cardano DAO, that is engaged in managing the development of the decentralised e-Learning platform, distributing ADA to contributors from its growing treasury.

The integration with other LMS (Learning Management Systems) is mandatory in the e-Learning platform field and it is guaranteed by the component PoLiL (in the development stage).

Exposing APIs will allow LMS to interact with BOUNDER, providing further integration.

3rd generation blockchain is not designed only for storing value, Defi and NFT but it is for real-life things and for public good like e-Learning. This is an extremely strategic use case for the Cardano community and the entire ecosystem.

In this case, the market opportunities are enormous. The EdTech projected global market size is $181.3B by 2025

<https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/educational-technology-ed-tech-market-1066.html>

and $377.85 B by 2028

<https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-education-technology-market>

The 1st of the Top 15 Largest EdTech Companies in the World is Kahoot:

15. Boxlight Corporation (NASDAQ: BOXL)

14. Course Hero

13. ApplyBoard

12. Stride, Inc. (NYSE: LRN)

11. Unacademy

10. Duolingo

9. Coursera, Inc. (NYSE: COUR)

8. 2U, Inc. (NASDAQ: TWOU)

7. Udemy

6. VIPKID

5. Zuoyebang

4. BYJU'S

3. Chegg, Inc. (NYSE: CHGG)

2. Yuanfudao

1. Kahoot! AS (Oslo: KAHOT.OL)

<https://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-largest-edtech-companies-world-155126885.html>

<https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/5-largest-edtech-companies-in-the-world-930988>

BOUNDER is designed to distribute ADA across all the contributors as revenue streams.

A web3 competitor of Kahoot doesn't exist yet. Let's make it on Cardano.

What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

Like every project in the Cardano ecosystem, the risk is always in finding the human resources who write the code. Haskell/Plutus is not common knowledge and because of that, the few developers available are extremely expensive.

This is one of the reasons why we created "e-Learning DAO", to offer not only remuneration for the developers but also ownership of what is built. It should make the scenario more attractive to them.

In the future, less and less developers will work for the "boss" (unless super paid). Many others will receive income from shared ownership of the platforms. WEB 3 is also this.

HOW DO GET PEOPLE TO ADOPT THE SOLUTION

We will build a website (useful also for tracking the progress of the development) where users can play with a demo account.

When the solution is stable and solid, we can start to do marketing campaigns.

Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

ACTION PLAN

• Milestone 1 (1 month):

1. Wireframing all the use cases (for teacher/verifier and student)
2. Define detailed workflows
3. Build the design
4. Build the user interface
5. Publish a website for progress tracking and marketing
6. Create a simple video explanation for marketing purpose

• Milestone 2 (1 month):

1. Build a micro Content Management System for editing/publishing the Ev-MCQs
2. Integrate the payment process from the credit card with AdaPay or a similar tool
3. Integrate an optional browser wallet like Nami for more expert users
4. Build the revenue sharing stream for the stakeholders based on their roles and contribute

• Milestone 3 (1 month):

1. Build the basic AI engine able to increase difficulty based on betting amount and user knowledge
2. Test and bugfix
3. Cloud publishing cost

Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

BUDGET BREAKDOWN

Requested fund: $39500

Number of designers/UX/UI needed: 1 - (Monthly salary average: $2500)

Number of project managers/coordinators: 1 - (Monthly salary average: $2500)

Number of Haskell developers needed: 1 - (Monthly salary average: $3500)

Number of Web developers needed: 1 - (Monthly salary average: $3000)

Extra costs including a year of cloud services: $1000

Estimated duration per milestone: 1 month

Estimated length of the project: 3 months

TOT COST PER DEVELOPER

Designer/UX/UI/website, 1 month of work, tot cost $2500

Haskell Developer, 3 months of work, tot cost $10500

Web developer, 3 months of work, tot cost $9000

Project manager/coordinator, 3 months of work, tot cost $7500

P.S.

For the Proposal Assessor (ex Community Advisor) concerned about the low budget required. This amount required is good enough for a decent development of the tool proposed. Obviously, making it fully featured could cost much much more, but I am convinced this is not the scope of Catalyst. If in the future there is enough traction for this product, I'm sure money will come from different sources.

Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

My name is Mario Altimari (https://www.linkedin.com/in/altimario) and I'm working full-time for the Cardano ecosystem in the e-Learning space, which I believe is one of the most important for the people's good.

The last May I quit my job where I was CTO of a successful international e-learning AI company, with several patents. I have 22+ years of experience in IT, I started my career as a software developer in the far 1999. I was a forerunner in 2006 of distance learning solution, participating in building the Italian Government e-learning platform “FAD” (Formazione A Distanza). I'm passionate about open source and data stream processing on distributed systems, that's why I built “Data Cruncher” <https://github.com/AltiMario/DataCruncher> the 1st data quality firewall on the market.

I love functional programming and am proficient in it with Clojure, I'm currently converting to Haskell.

I'm hands-on with everything, from architecture design to project management and coding.

• Alfredo, <https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfredo-gemma>

Researcher in Cybernetics and Deep Learning, currently CTO of AI company with several patents and published papers on the field of data compression and speech recognition. Alfredo wrote the paper “Measuring Conversational Fluidity in Automated Dialogue Agents” <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.11790.pdf> and “Fine-Grained Named Entity Recognition using ELMo and Wikidata” <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.10503.pdf>. He has more than 20 years of experience in the design and development of AI, including Distributed, Concurrent and Iterative Computing, Fuzzy Logic systems, Inferential Systems, Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computing, Network Security, Cryptographic Systems, Intrusion Detection and Hack-Proofing techniques.

Alfredo is our technical advisor.

• Bruno, <https://www.linkedin.com/in/brunobonacci>

Ex Apple, ex Cisco. Data Architect, High Volume Distributed Systems engineer, low-latency, Machine Learning. Tireless Open-source contributors. Functional programming guru using Clojure. 20+ years of commercial experience in IT.

Bruno is our technical advisor.

• Tasnia, <https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~01f50ad6cae904ee2b> is a Social Media Marketer with 6 years of experience in Twitter Marketing, Discord Marketing, NFT Marketing. Currently, she is involved in our Twitter campaign for @eLearningDAO

This is the main list of the hands-on contributors of e-Learning DAO who will develop this proposal:

<https://github.com/ing-Hugo> : Hugo is a junior Haskell/Plutus developer

<https://github.com/kritical0613> : Dennis is a senior full-stack developer with some blockchain exposition

<https://github.com/GruDev325> : Jax is a senior full-stack developer expert in blockchain

<https://github.com/mrron313> : Arif is a front-end developer

<https://vimeo.com/catchyanimations> : Vinail is a web designer, animator and video creator

A growing list of code contributors is here:

<https://github.com/orgs/e-Learning-DAO/people>

If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

This proposal has to be seen as a standalone tool but also an extremely important module of a bigger picture that aims to build a decentralised e-Learning platform.

The plan is NOT to return to Catalyst for further funding of BOUNDER as a standalone tool.

Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

BOUNDER is an open-source solution, which means the audibility is guaranteed by definition through GitHub commits, pull requests, and bug tracking.

However, we will also create a website containing information about the progress and the status of the development.

As part of the open development process, we are managing the DAO development via GitHub projects like this

and obviously via GitHub tickets like this

We will use gitcoin (and/or snapbrillia as bounties when they are ready) to engage other developers outside of our network.

In order to coordinate the development activities, we have created e-Learning DAO Discord Server, open to anyone interested in participating and/or just monitoring

What does success for this project look like?

Teachers receive passive income from the content created, every time a student bets/answers through BOUNDER

Many students will have just fun, but for many others, it will be an opportunity to learn.

Kahoot is the most famous gamification of quizzes, used by 50 million people. I believe there is enough space and request for an alternative "crypto" version of it. After completion, with the right marketing, BOUNDER can be used by hundreds of people and considering its open-source nature, the concept can easily become viral.

Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

it is an entirely new proposal.