Erzurum teacher family won second place at TEKNOFEST with its artificial intelligence agent named MAHİR

A team of 4 people, consisting of teacher brothers and their spouses in Erzurum, developed the Service Processing and Reporting Agent with Maarif Understanding (MAHİR), an artificial intelligence model that analyzes students' learning processes.

The team, consisting of literature teacher Zülal Ülker Daştan, who works as the project coordinator at the Provincial Directorate of National Education, and her husband, religious culture and ethics teacher Lokman Daştan, and Daştan's sister, science teacher Gonca Ergül, and her husband, mathematics teacher Hakan Ergül, developed an artificial intelligence model with a study that lasted about 5 months.

The idea, which started with discussing the problems encountered in education within the family, turned into an artificial intelligence-supported project with the idea of ​​​​producing teachers' own technologies.

The teacher team started working on "MAHİR" to find a solution to the time loss experienced in evaluating exams, tracking students' developments, and analyzing a large number of data regarding learning processes.

Developed by experienced teachers, MAHİR creates pedagogical analyzes by associating students' learning evidence during the education process with learning outcomes.

The artificial intelligence-based system aims to provide support to teachers in monitoring the development processes of students and evaluating the next stages by combining the data obtained with the framework plans and curriculum prepared within the scope of the Turkey Century Education Model.

They came second in TEKNOFEST

The teachers who participated in TEKNOFEST's Artificial Intelligence Language Agents Scenario Competition on Processing and Monitoring of Public Documents won the second prize among hundreds of projects organized in Kocaeli.

Zülal Ülker Daştan, a literature teacher who works as a project coordinator at the Provincial Directorate of National Education, told the AA correspondent that they are a family of teachers and that the project emerged with the ideas discussed in family conversations.

Stating that the project was developed in order to contribute to the new education process within the Türkiye Century Maarif Education Model, Daştan stated that MAHİR will provide significant support in monitoring the development processes of students.

Daştan continued as follows:

"MAHİR is a language agent that combines our students' learning evidence with learning outcomes throughout the education process, produces pedagogical analysis, makes evidence-based improvement suggestions, and supports the teacher. Our teachers have a lot of work to do in the teaching process. Our goal here is not to make it easier. To do better quality, more efficient work. In this sense, MAHİR will be the teacher's companion. He will help our teachers draw a road map. Help with questions such as where am I now? What are the developmental stages of my students? What should I do in the next stage accordingly?" "This study is the work of a team who came together with four teachers with 19-20 years of teaching experience and who know the source of the problem. The formation of MAHİR is the product of 5 months of day and night work."

Referring to their success at TEKNOFEST, Daştan said, "We had very strong competitors. As four teachers, we competed with mostly software engineers." he said.

"With this project, 2 billion documents will be processed annually."

Religious culture and ethics teacher Lokman Daştan said, "The new education model has a process-oriented approach, not a result-oriented one as in the old one. It aims to provide the best education to the student by frequently checking the processes. For this, all documents related to measuring the student are required to be analyzed. These processes take serious time and bring with them inefficiency. We have created such a product with our own Turkish-based artificial intelligence. We have created our own technology." he said.

Explaining that their goal is for the developed artificial intelligence model to contribute to the country's education field, Daştan said, "Come sit at a table for months - my sister-in-law works, I work with my brother-in-law. This is not an easy thing. We also have stress, but we bring the work to professional level as soon as possible. With this project, 2 billion documents are processed annually. This work will not stop, we will continue to produce." he said.

Teachers made their presentations in the hall named after the martyr teacher.

Science teacher Gonca Ergül, who was in the project team, said, "In the race we entered, we competed with experts in most fields. We were the only group of teachers. We owe this success to our openness to innovation and curiosity about technology. The name of the meeting room where we appeared before the jury was the name of our teacher Martyr Aybüke Yalçın. This was another pride for us teachers." he said.

Mathematics teacher Hakan Ergül also noted that they will continue to work for the development of the project.