BookWormZ

Inspiration

The inspiration for BookWormZ stems from the fact that we began the hackathon at a community library. Our location sparked talked about reading and how to best engage elementary school children in the activity. We reminisced on the paper-reading logs that would be crumpled at the bottom of our backpacks. We knew that we could find a better way to track students' reading progress throughout the school year while also encouraging reading time as a whole.

What it does

BookWormZ Goals - BookWormZ has three main goals:

1. Make reading more fun through an interactive log!
2. Ensure student reading progress does not go unnoticed
3. Promote growth by assessing student reading level based on words per minute after each reading log entry

Prototype Design - We designed the prototype to have three main tabs (accessible through the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen): Home, Class List, and Student Progress. The Home page features the class's reading highlights from the past week. The Class List page showcases the list of students in the class, allows you to view each student's reading log, and even add new entries. The Student Progress page displays which students may have changed reading levels and are now eligible for testing.

How we built it

Python - We built a Python script that inputs information from the student, such as type of book, number of pages read, and length of reading session, to calculate their reading rate (i.e. words per minute). This reading rate is then used to determine the student's reading level. The benchmark values for each reading rate were chosen by consulting a study from Ghent University in Belgium (https://scholarwithin.com/average-reading-speed). A comparison is made between the student's current reading level and their expected level, making it easy for teachers to identify which students are eligible for comprehension testing.

Figma - We also created a prototype on Figma to showcase our design ideas for the BookWormZ application. This prototype illustrates what we would want the interface to look like. Click on the Figma link in the "Try it out" links to view our app designs, and then click the play button in the top left of the navigation bar at the top of the screen to get a feel for the flow of the app.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge that we ran into was simply being new to hackathons! DevPost, GitHub, and Figma, Replit as our IDE were all new softwares that we had to learn.

Another challenge we ran into was the asynchronous nature and timing of the hackathon. We had to be realistic about what we could accomplish in the given weekend, taking into account our already-busy summer schedules. We managed to dedicate time to work on our hack and produce a project that we are very proud of!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our idea! We think BookWormz addresses a big problem in the classroom in an engaging way.

We are proud of our desire to strive for inclusivity! We tried to incorporate audiobooks as a possible valid book type in our Python script with the goal of including all students and their different learning styles.

We are proud that we completed our first hackathon!

What we learned

We learned how to work under time pressure and explore many different softwares as first-time hackers! This whole weekend was a wonderful learning experience that pushed us out of our comfort zone.

What's next for BookWormZ

In the future, BookWormZ could be used to share data with school boards to determine how each school is performing in terms of literacy. This would be based on whether most students are below, above, or at their expected reading level. This data can also be shared with cities and even across the country to determine municipal and national averages for reading levels.

Moreover, we are also interested in implementing a confidential rewards/points system that will motivate students to work on their readings and also prevent any form of bullying.

In terms of what's next with our development of BookWormZ, we want to make a more fully-fledged working prototype of our application that combines the interface design we created on Figma with our algorithm on Python.

Built With

• figma
• python