ImPACTful Literacy

imPACTful: saving educators critical time in lesson development

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Inspiration

My inspiration comes from my mom who is an English Language Development teacher in Montgomery County Public Schools. I have seen her spend hours after work, almost daily working on lesson plans and I was inspired to use AI to try and alleviate some of her work and teachers like her.

What it does

ImPACTful is a project designed to assist teachers in quickly and efficiently generating appropriate media and resources necessary to accompany lessons to ensure student comprehension of the text and overall lesson.

How we built it

ImPACTful is a full-stack application built with a lightweight Flask backend, and a responsive Angular frontend. ImPACTful leverages NLP to find essential vocabulary and summarize inputted passages. ImPACTful uses its essential word detection to request relevant images, videos, and translations, from Google Custom Search API, Youtube v3 API, and Google Translate API to reduce lesson planning time and promote literacy.

Challenges we ran into

Finding and integrating all the necessary APIs was a challenging and time-consuming task. Also, generating the PDF of essential vocabulary, with photos, translations, and keywords, was more difficult than I anticipated. This complexity arose from having to implement the PDF generation on the frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am so proud to have made a product that I believe will be genuinely useful for increasing the literacy of all students but especially those who are English learners, those with learning disabilities, and students of lower socioeconomic status. I am also so proud to have leveraged ML libraries in an application for the first time.

What we learned

I learned a lot about PACT and initiatives that are happening to increase the literacy of Maryland students and I realized just how valuable ML technology can be for some of the busiest and essential personnel in the education field.

What's next for ImPACTful Literacy

SO MUCH! There are many aspects of imPACTful that I would like to improve. I would like to add refinement to the media results of the keyword search. I would like to include the ability for teachers to add and tailor the Get the GIST section more. I would like to also test how much time I can actually save teachers.

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