This is an endeavor to help special needs students across the country develop their communication and social interaction skills in a secure, user friendly environment. This project was created at TartanHacks 2016 and received the Venture For America Social Impact Prize. It will be further developed into a minimal viable product.
There are 3 major components to the website:
- Word search - this allows students to search for words and hear their pronunciation based on the visual representation of the word they want to find. This helps them associate images with words and words with their pronunciation, effectively building students' vocabulary. This feature uses the SpeechSynthesis API.
- Conversation interaface - this allows students to practice conversations to simultaneously improve their communication and social interaction skills.
- Database functionality - using MongoDB, we have set up a database to track the words entered by students when they search. This is a powerful educational tool because it enables teachers to track students' progress and difficulties and better be able to attend to each individual students' needs.
Extra features:
- Facebook API for login
- Server written in Node.js to enable local hosting