Three ITS students who designed Language Booster, (from left) Dinda Fadhila, Azzam Jihad Ulhaq, and Shabrina Nur Lathifatul Afifah who are members of the Language Booster team

ITS Campus, ITS News – In the current era of globalization, English proficiency for a student is an absolute necessity. This is what prompted the student of the Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology (ITS) Azzam Jihad Ulhaq to establish a startup called Language Booster to support students in studying English tests.

Language Booster itself is a startup engaged in English training, especially in preparation for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Until now, there are three tryout packages available at language-booster.xyz, which can be obtained free of charge and paid for by getting a discussion of the questions.

Users who have taken the tryout will immediately get a score that has been converted as a TOEFL score. “Now, Language Booster is in the development stage for mobile apps on Android and iOS,” explained Azzam.

It’s been more than three months since Language Booster ventured to register in the 2021 Indonesian Student Startup Acceleration (ASMI) program to pass phase 2 funding. With this funding, Azzam and his team plan to switch to a mobile app. It is intended that various tryout tests and materials to be added can be accessed offline by users. “It’s not like going through a site that has to be accessed online,” said the founder and CTO of Language Booster.

The mobile application developed will have various TOEFL preparation materials, unlike before, which only provided tryout questions with discussion. With more funds, Azzam plans to add team members in the form of programmers and experts from the English Literature department who will compile material from various books such as Baron, McGraw Hill, and Longman. “We will pack the material in Indonesian so that it is easy to understand for those who are not fluent in English,” said the 2017 Informatics Engineering student.

This startup, which already has users from various places in Indonesia, will provide more personalized TOEFL test preparation lessons with artificial intelligence (AI). Each user will get material recommendations according to their ability to work on various questions. The questions issued in the exercise will also be following the skills of the user.

The available material will be divided into three, namely listening, reading, and structure. Azzam said that several skills must be mastered from each section, and each practice question given will represent each existing skill.

Users who often make mistakes in doing questions with specific skills will be recommended by the application to study the material. “The questions about these skills will be issued more often until the user is fluent in those questions, as well as vocabulary,” he added.

(from left) View of the Language Booster website and view of the application under development

Azzam admitted that this language booster would also be much cheaper than the general TOEFL preparation tutoring program. With one payment, users can access various materials and exercises anywhere and anytime. Moreover, with the latest personalization AI, making Language Booster like a private tutor teaching his students.

Booster language itself started from Azzam’s anxiety when he was a member of the TOEFL system development team and saw that many test results were still below standard. Not a few test results below this standard belong to final year students who need these scores for graduation. “In addition, when I served as general chairman of the ITS Manarul Ilmi Mosque (JMMI) in 2020, it turned out that there were also many who still had not achieved the minimum score,” he said.

Responding to this concern, the 2019 Tokopedia Devcamp Hackathon winner finally developed a site to study TOEFL together with two colleagues from ITS. As of February 2021, Language Booster was successfully launched with 15 early adopters.

Until May 2021, three TOEFL tryouts have been conducted through the Language Booster website with three question packages per month. During that time, there have been 300 users who have accessed the site, and this startup created by four ITS students has received a lot of feedback for the development of its location.

This student, who has had an internship as a software engineer at PT Okanemo Worldwide Indonesia, is eager to work with the student association at ITS to provide tryouts to its members. For him, with many users, of course, there will be a lot of feedback that will come in.

That way, continued Azzam and Language Booster can get a performance spike in users and features. “Here, we try to hear feedback from users to be able to provide a good experience when they use our services,” he concluded.

This development, of course, will increase their chances of winning ASMI in stage 3 at the end of 2021. With the available funds, they plan to hold a live class in 2022 for users who later need hands-on training. Also, after TOEFL, the material will be added to TOEIC and IELTS. (far/ITS Public Relation)

Reporter: Muhammad Miftah Fakhrizal