KISS Feed

Inspiration

In the United States, 54% of Americans aged 16-74 lack reading profiency, putting them behind 6th grade reading level. Our goal was to create a program that would allow any user to be able to have a safe, reliable RSS webfeed of news sources that can accurately interpret articles and other text in order to help emphasize the fun and importance of reading. The greatest benefit for our project is that this program can be used in any classroom from a 5th grade teacher to a high school business teacher. The implementation of KISS is only limited to the applicability to societies needs of understanding today's world.

What it does

KISS(Keep It Simple Stupid) is a learning tool for kids to understand real-time news and seek inspiration through the knowledge gained in their daily reads. Through the use of several machine learning implementations, KISS is able to interpret the body of news articles into easily digestible content in order to help simplify complex subjects and ideas.

How we built it

KISS was made from two different sides. Using a React framework, a reliable front end was made that could create dynamic components that could receive data from the api's and transcribe them into a model news feed. The React framework was also instrumental in implementing the machine learning API that would translate the text of the news into a clear coherent interpretation of what was written. Through the use of Express, a functional back end was able to store the data gathered from the API and decrease the load time by lightening the work load needed to be done on the front end.

Challenges we ran into

Obtaining a reliable API to webscrape news articles proved to be one of the biggest challenges with lots of APIs asking upwards of 500 dollars in order to use their proprietary algorithm. In one point in time our team juggled with a custom program that we made to obtain the bodies of the news articles, but due to the volatile nature of async implementations. On the front end, coding coding different web processes to show up on one page without crashing the website proved to be a considerable challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Succesfully implementing 3 API systems that interact with one another to make the website overall delivery smoother.
Learning about how to Utilize APIs effectively in a full stack package
Creating an optimal React program that can not only facilitate a robust front end but also receive data from the back end
Learned the importance of responsiveness in a program and reducing the number of functionalities in order to speed up a websites performance

What we learned

We learned how to successfully distribute workload in order to deliver a product on time.
We discovered the beautiful component implementations that React facilitates in order to help a websites performance.
We learned to rely on each other's judgement and ask for advice often in order to ensure the team stayed on the same page
We found out that it was very useful being overly ambitious with the amount of components in order to see what really needed in the initial delivery of our program.

What's next for KISS Feed

Kiss's future will include implementing a text-to-speech implementation in order to read content with the user and improve on a user's pronunciation comprehension. KISS Feed will continually update and improve the API implementations in order to facilitate larger texts to interpret as well as gather from more news sources. A filter will soon be implemented that will allow users to refine the articles based on category, publish data, and more. The overall plan for KISS is for it to be an open-source code that can be implemented by teachers across all disciplines to have a reliable news interpreter that can allow for their students to be more interested in news.