Brainy

Inspiration

The children in their first years of school are having a harder time during this COVID-19 period, because they have just started to learn how to read, write and calculate. Also, approximatively 20% of them have learning disabilities and in this years they must be discovered, if they haven’t been yet. All of these problems are already hard for the teachers to handle in normal conditions, but through zoom, teams or another video conference application is harder, especially for those children who have 2 working parents. Additionally, there are countries that were totally unprepared for this situation, because they don’t have a lot of digital solutions for education. So for all this problems, we were inspired to develop Brainy.

What it does

Brainy has some reading exercises adapted for all children, whether they have dyslexia or not. More specifically, they are given a text and using a speech to text, they are corrected when they don’t read a word properly. If the mistake persists, they can see the definition of the word, the breaking into syllables, synonyms and an image (in the case of nouns) so they can associate the word with something else. Also, they are able to hear the word as many times they want to. As researches show, children with dyslexia can improve their reading skills if they have a color overlay and a font with more space between the letters. Everywhere in the application we used the Arial font and the children are able to add a filter of a colour of their choice, set the transparency and also make the font bigger and with more spacing . This module is developed in 2 languages: Romanian and English. Also, just for the Romanian, we developed some dictations exercises. Those consist of an audio and an input, following that at the end of the exercise, the child will see his mistakes (example : he misspelled a word).

How we built it

The main technologies that we are using are NodeJS, Angular 9 and Amazon DynamoDB. For the reading exercise is used the speech-to-text library from Google, together with a web-socket implementation for sending the word that was read in real-time to the user. We also created a word’s details API which provides descriptions, synonyms, syllables and an image for the mispronounced words and we used text-to-speech from Mozilla in order to offer to the user the possibility to hear those words. All the functionalities from above are developed for both English and Romanian language.

In addition to these, we already finished the development for subscribing to newsletter and for contact.

Challenges we ran into

Here in Romania, Brainy is part of a pre-accelerator programme Innovation Labs and for this programme we work with a psychologist that helps us interpret the results of the exercises (especially the reading ones) so we could return a useful output, both for parents and the therapists. But this results are based on specific words in Romanian and the rules can not be translated in another language . So the biggest challenge we ran into this hackathon was that we were not able to return the results for the English exercises.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Pre-hackathon we contacted parents from Romania to complete a questionnaire about their challenges with the educational system and to understand if there is a real need for technical solutions. We received over 70 answers and 40 of them subscribed to our newsletter. During the hackathon we contacted them and talk about their struggles during this period, so we were able to *understand better their needs and problems *.

As technical accomplishments, in 2 days we translated the first page of Brainy to English and finished the reading exercises for both Romanian and English.

What we learned

We learned that with all the technology that is available right now and with a little bit of imagination we can build amazing things, that can help the people around us. Also the need for technical solutions it’s needed all the time, not just in this terrible times.

What's next for Brainy

Next we are gone deploy the site on brainy.ro, where at the moment is just the presentation page, because we temporarily use a free hosting service, that it’s not secured and it is too slow for our needs. But we have just won 1.500$ credit through AWS startup community and we will move our hosting there.

Also we will continue to develop Brainy, because the possibilities with this kind of application are endless. Our current goal is to add more and diverse texts for the reading and writing exercises so we will be able to offer our users different levels of difficulty. Next we will start developing fun and entertaining math games for children.

Long term we want to make partnerships with bookshops, so children will exercise their reading skills while enjoying a good book.