EtymonFlow

Inspiration

Our hack is inspired by the concept of acessible learning. We wanted to build a platform which is the best suited for all users, not only those who are the most abled. We also have been interested in the origins of words, and wanted to share the experience of learning about them with others. Additionally, we wanted to experiment with dymanically parsing information from the web by searching through html, and wanted to make a well-designed, dynamic display for all of the information.

What it does

Our project prompts the user to input a word through the terminal based upon a given set of options, and displays the etymology of the words visually, in black and white, Open Dyslexic font, with custom formatting, based upon the etymology tree which google displays.

How we built it

We used pygame in python to develop an interactable graphics window, and google to find information about the etymology of words.

Challenges we ran into

We have had to reorganize our code to make it more manageable and spend considerable time troubleshooting. As a result, the process was slower than ideal. We also planned to parse information from wiktionary parser, however, unlike google which has a neat tree image showing the etymology of a word, wiktionary only shows text. As a result, we were not able to parse the information automatically as planned.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have made a aesthetic interface, complete with rounded corners, arrows, and OpenDyslexic font. We have also managed to make the interface interactive, so that we can move the screen by dragging, and directly input the requested word in the terminal from among selected options.

What we learned

We learned how to create a dynamic interface and began to learn the process of parsing out information from html.

What's next for EtymonFlow

We wanted to make the project much more dynamic, and in later iterations of the project, we will do just that - we will allow the user to inpu the word in the interface we created rather than in terminal, and we will dynamically parse information about the etymology of the word from Wiktionary. With more time, we would also clean up the code into neater classes and definitions. At that point, we would also line to expand this project further. We would include more information about the word than simply its etymology, such as definitions and part of speech, and we would include text-to-speech audio, complete keyboard accessibility, multiple modes, including choice in level of contrast, color, and font. Eventually we would like to upload the project to a website where many people would be able to access it and benefit from it.

Built With

• pygame
• python
• wiktionaryparser