Project Skill Tree is a fairly ambitious project with the goal of creating a free application that allows users to create, share, and link to existing skill trees.

Motivation

I was presenting example ideas of how to improve the U.S. education system for a school project and I came up with an idea of gamifying knowledge acquisition through skill trees. Months later, I was somehow reminded of this idea while teaching my sibling how to code. I have thought a lot about improving U.S. education and I think making U.S. education a more fun game to play is a step in the right direction.

Problems Solved

I feel like this application could solve the following problems in this order of prioritization:

1. Help teachers create a self-paced curriculum for students, as well as keep track of their student's interests and progress.
2. Allow students of all ages to find high quality online resources through educational links and book ISBNs embedded in the skill tree nodes curated by the skill tree author(s).
3. Make education fun, visually appealing, and decentralized. This will be achieved through the "choose your own adventure" nature of the skill tree, dynamic interactive graphs, and community-driven contributions.
4. Solve the "What next?" question through well-trodden learning paths in the form of recommendations.
5. Encourage academic experimentation by prioritizing the option to forge one's own path.
6. Passively creating a decentralized method of recording the process of world knowledge acquisition across many people.
7. Decentralize the grading verification process: a system of verified professional graders (teachers, professors, instructors) can log in and grade their student's work. Each node will have an end-product project link to view their project somewhere on the web.