CoTrace

Inspiration

Language preservation has become more prevalent recently, yet opportunities to engage with it hands-on are still limited— especially for endangered alphabets. Inspired by Chinese character tracing books, our team developed a way for language users to share their knowledge with aspiring learners in a way where every click connects past to present.

What it does

By uploading images of written words, community. contributors provide resources for learners to practice tracing over and the opportunity to refine their writing skills in endangered languages. Users are able to select their target language, navigate between user-submitted words and phrases, and create vocabulary lists.

How we built it

CoTrace is hosted on a React framework powered by a Convex backend. We used Typescript to construct the UI.

Challenges we ran into

Narrowing down our ideas & picking which functionalities to focus on
Setting up the backend

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Submitting a project! (+ first hackathon for 3/4 team members)
Constructing a UI for the first time
Implementing our tracing tool

What we learned

A lot about react & display components
Gained confidence bringing a design from mockup to hi-fi using Figma
How to set up a backend
Best hackathon team nap schedules

What's next for CoTrace

Provide translations in more languages than just English to make our build more accessible to communities wanting to learn their own languages
Implementing AI to provide real-time feedback on tracing

We also wanted to recognize Nunavik-IcE for providing us with the Inuktitut words used in our build!