Toronto Police Services wants to find ways to intervene in youth that may be going down a path of drugs, crime, and gang violence. Current career tests for students are single-minded, focusing only on interests they hold at the moment. Plum uses a personality and aptitude test to identify job roles a candidate would fit well with. Our idea combines the problems of the first two statements with the unique opportunity Plum's psychometric test provides.
Our website allows students to take a psychometric test that analyzes their personality and aptitude for certain skills. An algorithm then reads their responses, and provides a number of mentors who match on a number of questions with the student's responses. The student then can access a chat application that allows them to reach out to these mentors and explore different career paths that they can consider. This takes the approach of intervening by getting students to think about an educational and career path early on in life, preventing ideas of entering a lifestyle of crime and gang violence from taking root.
We started with a basic html website format, creating different pages for an 'about us' section, a different page to take the test, and a final page to display matches. We used python as our backend to create the algorithm that analyzes responses to the demo test, and directs to the next page where it displays customized matches. We then implemented firebase to create our chat application that students would use to reach out to mentors. Finally, we used css to stylize our website and create a student friendly user experience.
We currently will be further developing our website to continuously improve user experience, as well as adapting our matching algorithm to provide greater accuracy in matching mentors to students. We additionally will work with the Toronto Police Services to create a list of adults in established careers who are willing to volunteer their time to mentor. After we have created a large enough pool of mentors and have developed our website and algorithm to our satisfaction, we will be running a pilot program with select elementary schools in the TDSB and TCDSB to determine the viability of running this project on a larger scale.