Paper Studio Code (P.S. I hate coding)

Inspiration

I was inspired by the general hatred of applied computer science: having to code, having to carry around electronics, and everything associated with computers as a CS major. In my years of undergrad want to play around with turning machines, do mathematics, and talk to ducks and so Paper Studio Code helps me by allowing me to touch computers a little bit less often.

What it does & How we built it

Paper Studio Code allows you to compile code you wrote on your paper using Google's Gemini AI ! It uses Tesseract.js to recognize the code from the webcam, Gemini to guess the programming language, Gemini to compile the code, and HTML/CSS/JavaScript to make the website itself.

Challenges we ran into

Ideating which technology to use was probably the hardest part. At first, I wanted to use OpenMV and have a physical standalone paper code compiler because it would limit having to touch a laptop, but OpenMV doesn't really have support for text recognition. I wanted to use Ruby or Haskell to code because they're the least disgusting programming lagnagues to me, but they're not super suited for web development. It was also freezing in Benedum Hall towards 3 AM and the colder my hands were the slower I coded. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CcahbDjraZQbVjmndT4za6NtH5g6thCjkh8ovoLc7ko/edit?usp=sharing

^that's my process portfolio for the project!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since I have an extreme dislike of computers, technology, and touching electronics, showing up and coming to a hackathon which is all about computers, technology, and touching electronics was the hardest thing for me. In order to solve this anti-computer issue I had to be pro-computer for 24 hours. I really felt the saying of, "You've gotta break a few eggs to make an omlette" !

What we learned

I learned that people like V13u41 St0510 C053 for some reason. I don't know why people like coding or coding on that platform. Please use Paper Studio Code instead of that.

What's next for Paper Studio Code (P.S. I hate coding)

Paper Studio Code has a little bit of trouble recognizing bad handwriting and distinguishing between similar languages like Python and Ruby, so I hope to learn more libraries to help with the ambiguity for both of them. Some other people suggested this could be used for people who don't have access to a computer but could write very neatly.