An offline android application has been established as a student guide tool for Papua New Guinean students.
Oliver Kinde spent one and a half years creating the software for grade 11 and 12 students to perform better in their internal assessments and can also guide students in the external assessments such as the Grade 12 National Examination to help them select proper choices in the school leaver forms, and properly apply for courses at tertiary institutions of their choice.
“I graduated at the Papua New Guinea University of Technology with a Bachelor’s Degree in Agriculture. My area of expertise is not actually computer science. The idea of computer science, programming and then software development came to me was when I first started with Digicel PNG back in 2014, 2015 and 2016. I had all my friends who were working in the network section, they were network engineers, so it basically inspired me to create something. So, what I did was went for night studies at ITI and I started to do programming and I came up with this idea of Edinfinite,” said Kinde.
He saw the need through his younger cousin, who kept upgrading his marks and got rejected by higher institutions several times.
“I thought, there has to be some sort of guidance provided and has to go down to grade 10. The problem is they are not guided in the internal assessment in grade 11 and 12,” said Kinde.
“So, the guidance system comes to effect exactly like how the Department of Education sends out guidance officers to give out information with booklets to guide the students in term 3.
“What we came up with is start guiding students straight after streaming, students have to choose what they want to be, what profession, what subjects according to that and which institution to get into when they finish grade 12,” he stated.
Indefinite features include; Shows Grade and predicted GPA whilst still a student, shows final grades and predicted GPA, Course match, Class cut-off/requirements, Points Difference, National Examination cut-off mark and rate and support links to genuine websites of all Tertiary Institutions in PNG.
Kinde stated that the testing process went well and received good feedback from several students from around the country that have used the software.
“Right now, we don’t have any mistakes, during the last 5-6 months we did trials with teachers, students in different schools in different provinces. We tried it in Morobe, Jiwaka, to Western Highlands, Southern Highlands and completed it in NCD,” he emphasized.
The software is currently reviewed by the Department of Education and High Education.