Inspiration
It's been studied that the current generation of University students are reading less and it shows.
Books Bunny turns your readings into a distraction-free speed-reading experience, helping students without losing comprehension with adaptive pacing and built-in understanding checks.
Long readings are the bane of every student’s existence. They’re slow to accomplish, and with all the distractions we have available, it’s hard to get them done, especially for students with ADHD.
Some of member have inattentive type ADHD, which means if a task does not consume 100% of our brain bandwidth (even 99% of it) intrusive thoughts spill in. This makes us think of other things and all of a sudden this 99% is now 50%. Speed-reading engages us to the point of hitting that 100%. 2 Fast 2 Furryous was built from that experience.
What it does
Books Bunny lets users upload a file and read it in a clean, distraction-free interface. The student can select a specific passage they’d like to read. Once a passage is selected, the text is presented in a distraction-free interface where students can customize the appearance of their reading experience, as well as modify the reading speed. At the end of a passage, comprehension checks help students verify that they’ve actually understood what they’re reading, and the app adaptively suggests reading speeds based on the students’ understanding.
How we built it
We built a web app that parses EPUBs into readable texts, breaking it up into sections to allow the user to easily. We followed the Spritz model of speed reading to properly engage and increase the efficiency of getting readings done.
Our tech stack includes a React front-end, with Gemini supporting our comprehension check quizzes.
Challenges we ran into
Parsing PDFs and EPUBs consistently was tricky, especially with different layouts and formatting. We also needed to make thoughtful design decisions to optimize for readability and capturing the student’s attention, to best serve our target audience of students, especially those with attention limits.
The algorithm to determine which letter is highlighted was also tough to determine, so we made our best approximation.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As primarily a designer, Christina was proud to have leveraged AI tools responsibly to understand the codebase as well as contributions to the frontend. She’s also proud to have made design decisions that contribute to a smoother experience.
As a frontend developer, Jon was proud to have built a smooth application, that puts the focus on helping people who need help to put in 100% of their effort. It was also a pleasure to have a professional designer so that Jon didn't have to do it all as well.
What we learned
We learned that when students optimize for reading as fast as possible, they typically don’t retain information, especially with how nowadays there are so many distractions.
What's next for Speed Reader
We would like to better support PDF parsing and add more theme customization to our app, so that the reader is fully comfortable.
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