Alex, Sebe, and Steven's Dictionary

Inspiration -

Inspired by the convenience of looking up unfamiliar words on the kindle e-book, we sought to bring a similar solution to Google Chrome. By having the ability to highlight new words and unfamiliar common phrases and find their meaning on the same webpage, this chrome extension will give individuals the ability to grow their vocabulary and understanding of texts in a convenient manner.

What it does -

Our Chrome Extension allows the user to highlight any word on any webpage that they are currently on and upon clicking our extension, a definition for this word is presented. Additionally, there is a button that reads the pronunciation of the word out loud for the user to hear. Some common idioms/phrases can also be defined through this extension.

How we did it -

We used event listeners to recognize when a word is highlighted by a user, sent that highlighted word to the Google backend, and then used a dictionary API to get a definition and pronunciation for the highlighted word. We then printed this definition to the screen and presented an option to hear the word using HTML and JavaScript code.

Challenges we ran into -

Implementing the dictionary API presented a lot of problems, such as finding an effective and free API, comprehending and writing the code to implement it, and extracting the data in the style that we wanted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of -

We are obviously proud that we were able to overcome the issues we already outlined, but we are also proud of the fact that we created a Chrome extension that we believe is truly useful, and can be applied to anyone and everyone as a simple yet effective way to save some time and possibly learn something new.

What we learned -

As each of us are first-time users of Javascript and HTML, we had to learn the very basics of the languages to even begin this competition. We're happy to say that we now have some working knowledge of these new coding languages and gained experience for our next Hackathon.

What's next for Alex, Sebe, and Steven-

This was the first coding competition that any of us have participated in, so we are each just excited to further explore different areas of computer science, both in academia and in the real world. Also Alex will probably switch majors to Comp.

Built With

• css
• html
• https://dictionaryapi.dev/
• javascript