Storyscape is an application aimed at developing elementary and middle schoolers' grasp over the English language. Turn on your mic and get ready to read some words!
To be specific, we have identified three core skills to be problematic: diction, sentence structure variety, and expressiveness.
- Using Google Gemini's AI prompts, kids have an unlimited amount of themes to interact and learn from.
- Hume's Semantic AI technologies determine user's tone, expressiveness, and evaluates reader comprehension!
All our team members enjoy reading as a hobby across numerous genres, with some fond core memories about interactive "Choose your own adventure" type narratives. Unfortunately, reading comprehension and literacy overall have been declining, which poses a massive problem for future generations. There are countless factors at play here, and we can't solve all of them, but we can definitely work to kindle a spark that might just blossom into a love for reading. Many of these adjacent tools are made for classroom settings.
On the contrary, we're built for students, by students, and by readers, for readers. We aim to bring interactivity and excitement back to reading for any in need of an opportunity to better their reading skills.
Storyscape is built on five major technologies:
- Google Gemini Flash -- speedy, cost-efficient, great at storytelling
- Hume AI -- personable, easy to integrate TTS, and great for sentiment analysis
- React/Next.js -- a popular JS framework that simplifies many best practices built for vercel
- Vercel -- easy deployment to the web
- Firebase -- a handy tool for auth, functions, storage and analytics
The majority of our challenges were mostly due to the fact that this project was completely created during a hackathon. Best practices in code and version management were forgone in favor of speed and "hackiness". This resulted in some questionable merges and confusing version control. Another problem we faced during the competition was the cold weather at night. We struggled to get some quality sleep due to the lack of comfortable sleeping arrangements :(