Inspiration
One of our group members was diagnosed with dyslexia. However, playing scrabble as a kid helped him practice skills in phonics, phonetics, spelling, and vocabulary. According to research, children between age 5-12 undergo a critical stage of language development. Yet, in most Singapore Primary Schools, the student-teacher ratio is commonly 40:1. As a result, it is often challenging for teachers to pay special attention to children with dyslexia and ensure that they are constantly motivated to develop their language skills, despite their condition.
As such, our group hopes to come up with a more convenient and interactive approach for teachers to help children diagnosed with dyslexia improve their language skills. With this product, teachers will not only be able to engage these children anywhere outside classroom, it also helps them keep close track of their progress in picking up language skills.
What it does
By offering a platform, where a child with learning difficulties can easily make use of simple electronic circuits and spelling to play a game. When given the alphabets, they have to spell words given by the adult supervising their learning. It is a value adding experience as it changes the concept of simply just learning through practice, it is build on basic electronic concepts of completing the circuit.
How we built it
Coming from different fields, and a personal interaction with the difficulties of learning with dyslexia, we came up with "Pieces of Fun". Using our skills of Electrical Engineering, we used a simple Arduino starter kit and designed our own circuitry. The circuitry works as a binary decoder and encoder. The Arduino using a blue-tooth module, will reply information that is sent from the PC/phone application.
The application built using Unity and C# acts as a central control system which will hold a history of the words and their results. An adult supervising the child's learning can easily pick the words they determine the children have difficulty with.
Challenges we ran into
The hardware interconnection for 26 alphabets led to many complications in the circuitry and wiring. In addition, we split our tasks (e.g. one member will take charge of coding the speakers while another will take charge of coding the logic behind the game). As a result, we faced problems merging our codes together and letting it work the way we intend it to run.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our group is made up of students from various educational backgrounds. Hence, we were able to split our work quite effectively by considering each other's skills and specializations. At the same time, we stepped out of our comfort zones and took the initiative to pick up new skills, which is also one of our main objectives of joining this hackathon. Also, we made sure to clarify anything we were unclear of, to ensure everyone is on the same page and to reduce misunderstandings. Thus, we were able to avoid any unnecessary conflicts and spent our time efficiently to complete our project.
What we learned
Other than learning new hardware and software skills (e.g. coding blue-tooth and speaker modules) that can be applied to our project, we have picked up precious soft skills such as patience, diligence and determination. An overnight hackathon would mean that people are often feeling hungry and fatigue. Thus, this gives them the temptation to just put aside the project and rest for the remaining duration of the event. It takes a lot of effort and perseverance for a team to complete the project in time together. Hence, we feel that this event has given us the opportunity to practice such soft skills that can make us better individuals in the society.
What's next for Pieces of Fun
We hope that with some minor modifications, we can utilize this product to help children with other language development disorders pick up language skills at a much similar pace as students with no such development issues. In line with Singapore moving towards a Smart City, we can include machine learning and artificial intelligence so that the game can be customized based on the learning pace of each child. We will also gradually move towards making the game an interactive self-directed learning approach for all students, slowly allowing them to be independent from adult supervised learning.
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