SkillSpark

Our app, SkillSpark, cultivates curiosity and a passion for learning real life skills in youth with visual disabilities by connecting youth with live mentors and subject experts.

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Inspiration

Jeffrey's father has the visual disabilities of legal blindness and nystagmus which are connected to his father's lifelong congenital chronic illness of albinism. Throughout Jeffrey's entire life, he has been his father's primary caretaker. Supporting his father as he struggled to gain employment, learn basic life skills, and live a dignified life despite health issues inspires our creation of SkillSpark. After doing market research and interviews with potential SkillSpark users, we designed features and subjects around life skills that his father and his visually impaired peers would have benefited from during their youth. Thus, these lessons are crucial for all youth who live with a disability.

Issues We Aim to Tackle The darkness of isolation and limited opportunities fades away with SkillSpark. Youth with visual disabilities face several environmental barriers when trying to access quality education in the context of academics and practical life skills. We address the challenges of access to education, mentors, and social connections, paving a bright new path for youth with visual disabilities to thrive. According to the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS), there were an estimated 600,000 children with vision difficulty in the U.S. Only 42 percent of working-age adults 21 to 64 years old with a visual impairment in the US are employed. Through SkillSpark, we not only cultivate life skills for youth with a visual disability, but also help them thrive in today’s evolving socioeconomic environment.

Common Challenges Based on Our Research

  1. Lack of social capital, networking, learning resources, mentors.
    • a. Having a visual disability can be isolating. Presents barriers to education, exposure to various fields, and to mentors/resources.
    • b. Leads to lack of preparation of life skills (personal finance, life hacks specific for people with visual disabilities, applying to scholarship opportunities) for the real-world.
  2. Children with vision impairments who do not have the same ability to visually observe the activities of those around them will likely require specific teaching to pick up on how to perform various daily living activities.

What it does

Features:

  1. Live Mentorship: Users can connect with live mentors and subject experts for one-on-one sessions tailored to their interests and learning goals. These live lessons allow youth to learn up-to-date skills and information relevant to today’s environment.
  2. Voice Navigation: The app aims to have full voice command navigation, ensuring accessibility for users with visual disabilities.
  3. AI Tools: In cases where live mentors are unavailable, AI tools are available to answer questions about life skills and suggest relevant resources. It also gives the option to request appointments for the next available open expert.
  4. Appointment Scheduling: Users can request appointments with available experts based on their availability, making it convenient to schedule learning sessions.
  5. Diverse Communities: The app expands its use cases beyond people with disabilities to youths from the underserved communities who also lacks social capital and economic upward mobility.
  6. Lessons on Youth, Gym, exercise, dieting: offers fully-guided exercises with youth with a patient instructor who will go through exercises with the youth to supplement their physical education participation.

This app aims to cultivate curiosity, foster a passion for learning, and promote social inclusion among youth with visual disabilities. By connecting them with live experts and mentors, it expands their learning opportunities, increases employability, promotes a healthier lifestyle, and enhances their social and life skills.

How we built it

We used Figma for front-end design and prototyping, Freepik for royalty-free vectors and images, an AI Voice Generator for showcasing AI-assisted voiceovers, and a lot of YouTube tutorials on how to use Figma, including adding animations, UX interaction elements, and prototyping.

Challenges we ran into

As beginner app developers without experience in full-stack app development, bringing our app to life and showcasing its desired features were challenging. To overcome this, we turned to Figma and learned to use its prototype function to design the app, user interaction, and showcase the features we've envisioned.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of all the learning and growth we experienced while expanding on our app idea from a shared Google Doc to a prototype demo using Figma. Additionally, we incorporated innovative methods to optimize our app’s UI by researching color theory to include specific colors that people with visual disabilities could see best. Through our teamwork, we learned how to tailor an innovation to the specific needs of the community we aim to serve and thoughtfully create a product that diverse users could conveniently access and use.

What we learned

This was our first experience learning and using Figma, and we gained valuable insights throughout this hackathon. We explored methods to enhance app interactivity by utilizing Figma's prototype feature and incorporating animations and interactive elements. This collaborative endeavor not only enriched our project, but also accelerated our learning and development in UI/UX design. It's fulfilling to witness our ideas and features materialize through the Figma design and prototype.

What's next for SkillSpark

Future features:

  1. Vibration of speaker function to help users locate buttons easily.
  2. Full AI voice navigation.
  3. Ability to connect the child’s app and account to parents’ phones to allow collaboration in learning along with parental supervision.

As we continue to further develop our coding skills, our goal is to integrate advanced features into the app, build an interprofessional team, and learn all the necessary coding techniques and languages to transition SkillSpark from a prototype to a fully-fledged app available on app stores.

Built With

  • figma
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