SketchIt

Inspiration

In a world where verbal communication is heavily emphasized as an important life skill, one thing individuals miss out on is the world of communication through sketching and design. Learning how to draw and convert thoughts into design is crucial, from enhancing creativity in children to conveying ideas in work collaboration as adults. So our group decided to create SketchIt to enhance art education (and education in general) and creativity in the world today.

What it does

SketchIt converges the learning process into 3 simple steps: upload an image you want to learn to draw, receive insight and steps on the different layers and strokes that make up the image, and practice drawing these simple strokes until perfection.

How we built it

For the front-end of SketchIt, the primary tools and languages we used were React and JavaScript along with CSS and Bootstrap for styling. Our goal was the initial stages of SketchIt was to create a program that processes an image of a person and uses face detection to extract data and output back to the user the steps to sketching someone's face. This was possible through Microsoft Azure's Face API; extracting the necessary information from API calls, we were able to deliberate a method of generating lines that outline a person's face key to sketches.

Challenges we ran into

Our team was filled with passion and enthusiasm for creating a meaningful and unique application but lacked some of the technical knowledge to implement the innovative technologies available to us. For us, this meant working with APIs (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) and web languages (React, JavaScript).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Oh how we all learned so much! Not only were we able to deploy a functional web application, but in the process of building SketchIt, we learned new skills as we had aspired to in participating in Big Red //Hacks--working with APIs, enhancing our skills in web development, and better understanding the role and growing importance of education in today's society as well as how technology can improve and empower education for all.

What we learned

Check out our accomplishments :)

What's next for SketchIt

Sketching down ideas is a simple concept easily applicable to several areas. While for our first implementation we focused on faces, we envision SketchIt to be able to teach individuals how to sketch anything they wish to draw. From architectural planning to designing robots and even scientific observation, people are always conjuring new ideas and need to get those ideas down and out. As our teachers have conveyed to us and many others, the best method of doing so is bringing pen to paper and sketching out the very beginnings of what will be remarkable ideations.