TimeTrekkr

Inspiration

Children are the world's best learners. We want to nurture and encourage children's inquisitive nature for history and provide a medium for them to explore historical events at their own pace.

What it does

An interactive storyboard that embarks users on a magical journey through time – in our case, Ancient Egypt! Children have the opportunity to interact with features such as hover animations and clickable images as they learn about the Nile River, Egyptian Pyramids, and the Great Sphynx of Giza. Text-to-speech technology can read the story out loud to children, increasing its accessibility to those whose reading abilities aren't as advanced. An AI-powered fun fact generator will also give you almost an infinite number of fun historical facts that happened on the current date!

How we built it

Our storyboard was illustrated by hand using ProCreate. The web application was built using React.js, OpenAI API, and React's Web Speech API, with iPad interface prototyped on Figma.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was creating a cohesive and visually compelling illustration that reflected the natural progression of time throughout history. Another challenge was developing a historically accurate, informative, yet simple-to-understand story that children can understand and will want to continuously engage with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After being stuck in the brainstorming phase and repeatedly revisiting the drawing board for almost three hours, the vision we had for our product finally clicked. One key accomplishment is that our entire storyboard illustration is hand-drawn by our designer. We are proud to say that TimeTrekkr is created with love by our designer (Alicia), developer (Trisha), and product managers (Elena and Oliver).

What we learned

Throughout this 27-hour hackathon, we learned the importance of vision. After we finally arrived at our idea and were on the same page, it was a smooth ride upward. Researching, designing, and developing a product that we were all truly excited about motivated us to keep going until our end goal was in sight.

What's next for TimeTrekkr

Our product is currently a web application, but we aim to improve its accessibility by developing TimeTrekkr into an iPad-friendly iOS application. We also aim to eventually integrate our product into the BC K-4 curriculum as a supplementary resource that teachers can use to support the delivery of classroom social studies content.

Built With

• figma
• openai-api
• pitch
• procreate
• react.js
• web-speech-api