Monkey See, Monkey Do

Inspiration

One of our team members is taking an American Sign Language class and learning some things about the deaf community. One of the things that she realised separates the hearing community from the deaf community is (obviously) the language barrier and that there are not a lot of hearing people who learn ASL.

What it does

The goal is to make ASL more accessible for hearing people to use and thereby encourage them to reach out to the deaf community. Our app contains a database of English words and their ASL equivalents. The user (the hearing person) would type in a sentence they wish to say in ASL, then the app would translate it into ASL word order and display the necessary videos. Ideally, the hearing person would copy the movements on the video to the deaf person. Monkey see, monkey do.

How we built it

With a lot of patience! And rocking out to Fallout Boy. And a LOT of questioning more knowledgeable people. And bubble wrap. And persistence. And duct tape.

Challenges we ran into

Understanding information and implementing it in a very short time period and in this cold room. Also teaching ourselves Android Studio on the fly and finding a suitable way to store our videos for retrieval. And getting the videos to play on the device. Basically everything was a challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

That it works the way we wanted it to and that we created something that could really make a difference in somone's life.

What we learned

How to use Android Studio and a bit of ASL

What's next for Monkey See, Monkey Do

Make more words and videos! And eventually taking English sentence structure, converting it into ASL sentence structure, displaying multiple single-word videos in ASL (so dynamic sentence structure creation).