Bridge

Inspiration

Our community is composed of 50% Spanish speakers and 50% English speakers. The composition of our community often causes communication issues and divides our small town. We wanted to find a way to resolve the language barrier through education and translation. We also noticed a large need for improvement in our education system when it comes to parent teacher communication. This another issue we wanted to focus on in our app.

What it does

Due to our short time frame, we were only able to complete the real-time translation aspect of Bridge. This means you can record a person speaking and that conversation translates into another language in real-time.

How we built it

We used the MIT App Inventor to create Bridge.

Challenges we ran into

Kayle is the only person on our team with any coding experience, but it is very minimal. We struggled learning how to create an app for the first time. It was difficult learning how to use the MIT App Inventor, but luckily it’s very beginner friendly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we officially made our first app! We didn’t believe this was something we were capable of and are extremely proud of our product!

What we learned

We learned the importance of communication within a community. Language barriers can be incredibly difficult to overcome, but it’s important that we take the steps to build a BRIDGE over that barrier! We also learned the importance of a team. None of us could have done this without our intern or each other!

What's next for Bridge

Bridge is just now starting! We hope to expand Bridge over the next few years to include all the amazing features we touched on in our work book. We want to include a parent teacher communication feature for a version that could be implemented in schools. This would provide translations of parent and teacher messages in to the users preferred language. Another feature we hope to add is a language learning aspect. While real-time translations are extremely useful, they are more of a short term solution. Educating members of our community on basic communication in various languages will provide a long term solution to demolishing the language barrier!

Built With

• mit-app-invented