Inspiration
We wanted to create an educational game that would be fun and engaging for all kids, even those who are dyslexic or have ADHD using OpenCV.
What it does
The game has a series of mini games. One of the mini games lets you practice tracing letters using a yellow object, such as a yellow ball on a screen that displays the text and a picture representation of the word. Another game is "Bubble Pop" which has bubbles with letters falling from the top of the screen. The user then clicks the proper letters to spell the word, whose picture is displayed in the left hand corner. The third part of our project allows the user to practice reading. It uses the mediawiki API to obtain a two sentence snippet of the summary of a particular topic. We then parsed the json to obtain the pure text output. In future versions, we plan to implement a user input tool.
How we built it
We split the project into different pieces - someone worked on getting the tracking to work, another person worked on displaying the openCV with Tkinter, the third person worked on creating the mini game, and a fourth person worked on API's. Then, we made it such that every frame was redrawn in tkinter. This allowed us to import images onto the screen.
Challenges we ran into
Our team met 30 minutes before the hackathon started to discuss our ideas and choose potential modules and technologies for our project. We also decided on several prize categories we were interested in. We became excited about creating educational mini games to teach English to young children using the Kinect, which 2 of us had learned how to develop with during the workshop last weekend. However, we found out after the hackathon started that all the Kinects were given out. On of our teammates had “reserved” a Kinect for her TP, so she obtained the last remaining one from a TA. We spent 1 hour trying to make it work, and finally concluded that the Kinect was broken. We then had to switch over to OpenCV, which none of us had used or had installed on our computers. We spent hours doing basic configurations, but set a good foundation for the work we accomplished today.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite the challenges of making this application, we are proud of the many new things that we accomplished. Installing OpenCV was our first achievement. The next milestone was when we got balltracking working. Next, successfully merging the OpenCV and Tkinter portions of the code was the next challenge we overcame.
What we learned
We learned how to successfully track brightly colored objects in openCV and how to integrate tkinter and openCV to produce a nice user interface and interactive games.
What's next for Fun with Words
We might add more features to track accuracy for the tracing, and other mini games that not only help with reading and writing, but also with math. Instead of openCV, we could also take this idea and broaden it to Kinects.
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