Handwriting Teacher

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  Input in process on a fresh journey for learning!

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  Well on our way to legible handwriting!

Inspiration

We are part of a generation that has lost the art of handwriting. Because of the clarity and ease of typing, many people struggle with clear shorthand. Whether you're a second language learner or public education failed you, we wanted to come up with an intelligent system for efficiently improving your writing.

What it does

We use an LLM to generate sample phrases, sentences, or character strings that target letters you're struggling with. You can input the writing as a photo or directly on the webpage. We then use OCR to parse, score, and give you feedback towards the ultimate goal of character mastery!

How we built it

We used a simple front end utilizing flexbox layouts, the p5.js library for canvas writing, and simple javascript for logic and UI updates. On the backend, we hosted and developed an API with Flask, allowing us to receive responses from API calls to state-of-the-art OCR, and the newest Chat GPT model. We can also manage user scores with Pythonic logic-based sequence alignment algorithms.

Challenges we ran into

We really struggled with our concept, tweaking it and revising it until the last minute! However, we believe this hard work really paid off in the elegance and clarity of our web app, UI, and overall concept.

..also sleep 🥲

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of our text recognition and matching. These intelligent systems were not easy to use or customize! We also think we found a creative use for the latest chat-GPT model to flex its utility in its phrase generation for targeted learning. Most importantly though, we are immensely proud of our teamwork, and how everyone contributed pieces to the idea and to the final project.

What we learned

3 of us have never been to a hackathon before! 3 of us never used Flask before! All of us have never worked together before!

From working with an entirely new team to utilizing specific frameworks, we learned A TON.... and also, just how much caffeine is too much (hint: NEVER).

What's Next for Handwriting Teacher

Handwriting Teacher was originally meant to teach Russian cursive, a much more difficult writing system. (If you don't believe us, look at some pictures online) Taking a smart and simple pipeline like this and updating the backend intelligence allows our app to incorporate cursive, other languages, and stylistic aesthetics. Further, we would be thrilled to implement a user authentication system and a database, allowing people to save their work, gamify their learning a little more, and feel a more extended sense of progress.

Built With

• chat-gpt
• css
• easyocr
• flask
• html5
• javascript
• p5.js
• python