Innovative medical students need your support
Two Leeds students who have developed a successful mobile app and website to help with exam revision need your votes to win a competition for funding to allow them to develop their idea further.
James Gupta and Omair Vaiyani have developed 'MyCQs', a platform enabling students to create and share their own multiple choice questions to help with exam revision.
James explains: "Omair and I realized the value of writing and practising multiple choice questions long before we developed MyCQs. For the last few years, our main revision method has been creating Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) and challenging each other on them. This is a fantastic way to learn, and there is value in reading through course material, both to create the questions and choose the best options, as well as then taking the test and getting feedback on your answers.
"So last year, we created our own website and shared the tests online with our year-group. We received amazing feedback from this and realized our tests had helped approximately 50% of the year group, who used them regularly and a real ‘community’ developed around people commenting on, suggesting improvements to and writing their own questions for our year. So, over the summer we developed a fully-fledged iOS app and further developed the website – MyCQs. All students could now use the website and app to create MCQs and share them with friends and course-mates."
After just 12 months, MyCQs has:
- 700-850 website visits per day
- 100 app downloads per day
- 6,600 registered users (users do not need to register to take tests)
- 1, 800 tests (45,608 questions!) which have been taken 28,455 times
- over 30,000 downloads overall
- Featured in The Guardian
Users range from special needs teachers, students from other courses and even airline pilots.
The two now plan to commission some high quality, ‘verified’ MCQs from doctors, scale up the platform and add new features which will transform it from being a hobby project into a leading educational platform.
They have entered MyCQs into a Higher Education Funding Councils Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) student innovation competition to win £5,000 so that they can put these plans into practice. The competition is decided by online voting, which closes at 5pm on 30 May 2014.
Read more about MyCQs and cast your vote.
See the MyCQs website.