Smart Education Supply Preparedness

Education is evolving with remote online education coming to the forefront during the Covid-19 pandemic. This has also driven students to be more self-driven and prepared without the classroom help, they would have received from teachers. In this paper, we discuss how modern technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, smart intelligent speakers enabled with fast wireless connections like 5G, can enable students to be better prepared for their classes without unnecessarily worrying about their preparedness every day. We have lots of things to remember for school in addition to our studies. Every day, we have to remember to check our school supplies. If we forget, we may have to scramble for our school supplies or to get them ready for use during classes. The supplies may also be out of place for various other reasons. Sometimes parents, siblings or friends borrow our supplies and forget to return. Sometimes we go on a vacation and the night before school, we realize our supplies are not in place. We may have to put reminders for this repetitive and mundane task to check our supplies every day. The above problem made me think that there got to be some way in today’s day and age to take care of this repetitive but important task in a smarter way. I have contemplated a design consisting of a smart organized supply box which will store different types of supplies with slots designated for same. The box will provide personalization options with inputs such as age and other optional configurations about the user of the box, making it usable for students of different ages. The intelligent box will use IoT visual sensors placed inside with adequate lighting, to capture images of supplies. The sensors interface with a circuit, that takes inputs from the sensors and detects scenarios like inadequate shape of items (blunt pencil, broken pencil etc.), lack of items (missing erasers, specific colors etc.), misplaced items etc. Once detected, the circuit passes appropriate programmed commands to connected voice control devices like Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple Siri etc. These devices would take the commands and send voice alerts and/or send alerts on the smart phones for the students or parents to replenish and/or ready specific supply items, if needed. Additionally, the box can generate insights for parents to monitor and analyze consumption habits of the students over time; and the degree to which they are organized in their daily lives. This will enable parents to work with the students to achieve the habits, lifestyle and goals they desire. Finally, automating these regular tasks will improve productivity, save time and make our school life much easier and efficient - after all, time is something the smart people say, cannot be bought with money. Some of the changes in our lives necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic will have lasting impacts. Living our daily lives smartly and efficiently for a better school-life balance certainly will be one of them, and my paper contributes to this goal.