Team: Oscar AI

Team Participants:

  • Joaquin Arredondo

  • Patricia Chaparro Chacon

  • Gudrun Enger

  • Giang Thanh Nguyen

  • Harish Thanigaivel

“We really wanted to create a chatbot that was gonna surface a lot of this information early and easy and get the students engaged and excited about coming to Hartnell College and discovering their passion.”

Problem

A significant portion (up to 70%) of students under 25 enter community college without a declared major, leading to delays in graduation and extra units taken. Traditional career assessments are formal and intimidating, and program information exists in static, disconnected formats, making it difficult for undecided students to find guidance.

Technical Solution

The team developed a friendly chatbot that helps undecided students discover their interests through open-ended, low-pressure questions. The chatbot then matches these interests to specific Hartnell College programs and career paths, showing degree requirements, timelines, and transfer options. The goal is to reduce the time it takes for students to choose an appropriate major, ultimately leading to faster graduation.

Showcase

Presentation RecordingA recording of AI Summer Camp students presenting their project.
SlideshowThe accompanying slides shown in the video.
Source CodeAll of the code and assets developed during the course of the AI Summer Camp.

About the DxHub

The Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) is a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is the world’s first cloud innovation center supported by AWS on a University campus. The primary goal of the DxHub is to provide students with real-world problem-solving experiences by immersing them in the application of proven innovation methods in combination with the latest technologies to solve important challenges in the public sector. The challenges being addressed cover a wide variety of topics including homelessness, evidence-based policing, digital literacy, virtual cybersecurity laboratories and many others. The DxHub leverages the deep subject matter expertise of government, education, and non-profit organizations to clearly understand the customers affected by public sector challenges and develop solutions that meet the customer needs.