What happens when you put the following ingredients together?

• 1 bright college student who has a passion for entertainment technology, drama, and computer science.
• 1 artful user experience designer who loves researching human computer interaction.
• 1 software engineer who likes to push the limits of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
• 1 mission: to invent something cool to support great teaching and learning?

After studying various chatbot frameworks, collaborative proposal writing, and hard work, we are proud to present the HistoChat Kickstarter project.

Meet HistoChat

HistoChat is an open-source, modular chatbot service that connects students with historical figures to make history cool again.

 

Meet Patrick Mathis, Creator of the HistoChat Kickstarter Project

Patrick Mathis, a college student at Mercer University, came up with an answer. My software team and I had the pleasure of meeting Patrick through a technical communications class devoted to writing proposals. My team and I served as technical mentors to this class. In the spirit of project based learning, we challenged Patrick and his fellow students to collaborate with us to create innovations in educational technology. Since our generation is greatly influenced by mobile technology and gaming, we asked them to consider creating game based learning experiences.

Patrick and his team proposed the following question:  “Could we inspire the study of history by enabling students to talk with major historical figures of the past?”

Could we make it possible for students to with talk with Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, or Martin Luther King, Jr?   This sort of experience is explored by science fiction all the time! Consider the following example from “Star Trek: the Next Generation.”  In this scene, Commander Data using their Holodeck technology converses with Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, and Steven Hawkings as part of his personal study of humanities.

Sounds crazy right?

It turns out the research for meeting historical characters using technology has already started. Patrick and his team introduced our team to the “synthetic interview” research from Carnegie Mellon University.  In their study, students could ask questions of Charles Darwin.

During the HistoChat Kickstarter Project, we will be producing an open-source, modular chatbot service that connects students with historical figures to inspire the study of history.  This will follow the spirit of the “synthetic interview” research from Carnegie Mellon.    From a natural language processing perspective, we are also interested in pushing the limits of the chat bots medium using ChatScript by Bruce Wilcox.    Most chat bots found on the Internet pattern match on simple keywords and strings.   The ChatScript platform can pattern match on concepts while keeping a concise and clean syntax.   For more details, please visit the following article from Gamasutra.

Thank you’s!

Walt Disney once said that “All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”  My team has been very excited that Patrick has chosen to collaborate with Mercer Engineering Research Center on this project.   We really appreciate Patrick’s extra time and effort in forming the vision for this project and the proposal video.   When we successfully fund the HistoChat Kickstarter project, we are excited to offer him a position on the team that will bring HistoChat to the teaching community.

We are also thankful to the leadership of Mercer Engineering Research Center, professors at Mercer University Department of Technical Communication, and leadership of Mercer University.    As a young professional, I am inspired by the spirit of collaboration to help foster creative project based learning experiences for students.

How can you help?

To our family of InspiredToEducate readers and #edtech community, we need your help to bring Patrick’s vision for HistoChat to students.  Please visit our HistoChat Kickstarter page and consider backing Patrick’s proposal.

HistoChat: Chat With History

 

 

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