Inspiration
We were inspired by community-driven events such as summer reading events that have existed to promote reading skills and writing skills in our town. As literacy rates have declined across the globe, similar programs are needed now more than ever. Even in the United States, a developed country, only 47% of kindergarten students were reading at grade level during the 2021-2022 school year. So, we wanted to make reading challenges more scalable (by using a website) and more engaging and valuable (using AI to gauge users’ understanding of the text) so that users learn more.
What it does
Right on Read provides a game-like competitive environment that encourages people to read by allowing them to join reading competitions created by other users of the website. These competitions give a list of books for competitors to read and the website verifies that the books are thoroughly read by generating questions about the book with AI and asking the user to answer them successfully answering the question marks the book as read and gives the user credit for that book in the competition. The website also can
How we built it
We built the website using Streamlit. The website references a MongoDB database using pymongo to store user, competition, and book data so that different users can interact with the same website. The website uses an API request to Project Gutenberg to get data. The website also uses both openai and google-generative apis to parse through book text, generate questions based on the text, and judge user responses (both textual and visual). Specifically, Google’s “gemini-1.5-pro” model was used to analyze the image of the user’s book to prove that they had read it.
Challenges we ran into
First time using MongoDB for most of us and making Streamlit applications with multiple users Twilio requires phone numbers to be verified, a process which takes several business days. So we couldn’t use it to nudge users to read via text and interact with them using generative A.I.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Made a website that successfully connects with an external database to get user, competition, and book information.
What we learned
How to use MongoDB to make a multi-page Streamlit app How to use different AI models in different ways in a single application based on their strengths
What's next for Right on Read!
Add notifications to remind users to read more. Add a leveling system where reading books and completing competitions allows users to level up
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