BoardBuddy

Inspiration

BoardBuddy was inspired by the lack of accessibility to tools that reduce language barriers in modern classrooms. We believe that this tool could be utilized in the City of Syracuse and abroad to improve classroom accessibility.

What it does

Our project provides a whiteboard translation service by replacing text on the board itself with an accurate translation to a language of the user's choice. This translated text is then shown on a returned image, maintaining the layout of the board and other non-translatable symbols.

How we built it

We built this app using Next.js, Python, Google Vision, Google Translate and Python libraries such as OpenCV. The Next.js frontend provides a seamless user experience while the Python backend provides a translated image to the user.

Challenges we ran into

• The idea: It took a while to come up with a fun idea that we truly believed would benefit our peers.
• Restarting: Our initial idea was forced to be scrapped 5 hours in due to a lack of publicly available developer tools.
• Next.js: Next.js is a new framework for the majority of our group, and this is the first major JavaScript frontend project that anyone in our group has participated in.
• Navigating the complex APIs required took an extensive amount of research and effort.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of our ability to utilize unfamiliar resources to create a polished, responsive application of such complexity.

What we learned

We learned that we are capable of a lot when we work together as a team.

What's next for BoardBuddy

BoardBuddy will continue on to support more languages and utilize improved security features.

Built With

• google
• google-translate
• google-vision
• javascript
• next.js
• opencv
• python