Storyscape

multiple modes for different skills!
cat assistant walking user through a paragraph!
learning new words!

Inspiration

All our team members enjoy reading as a hobby across numerous genres. Unfortunately, reading comprehension and literacy overall have been declining, which poses a massive problem for future generations. There are countless factors at play here, and we can't solve all of them, but we can definitely work to kindle a spark that might just blossom into a love for reading. Many of these adjacent tools are made for classroom settings. On the contrary, we're built for students, by students, and by readers, for readers.

What it does

Storyscape is an application aimed at developing elementary and middle schoolers' grasp over the English language. Turn on your mic and get ready to read some words! To be specific, we have identified three core skills to be problematic: diction, sentence structure variety, and expressiveness. You will be given an unlimited amount of examples for each of these and the opportunity to practice and replicate these examples. With the help of our cat assistant, you can learn how to read passages expressively and eloquently!

How we built it

Storyscape is built on five major technologies:

Google Gemini Flash -- speedy, cost-efficient, great at storytelling
Hume AI -- personable, easy to integrate TTS, and great for sentiment analysis
React/Next.js -- a popular JS framework that simplifies many best practices built for vercel
Vercel -- easy deployment to the web
Firebase -- a handy tool for auth, functions, storage and analytics

Challenges we ran into

One major problem we faced during the competition was the cold weather at night. We struggled to get some quality sleep due to the lack of comfortable sleeping arrangements :(

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We would actually use this app ourselves after some minor improvements!
Created a polished and aesthetically pleasing web app demonstrating AI technologies
Stayed up 24 hours in a row

What we learned

This hackathon was a great opportunity to learn about all the different AI technologies that are out there and how we can implement them into our lives. We learned about sentiment analysis, some handy prompt engineering, and some techniques to interface with AI in a smart way.

What's next for Storyscape

We're still working on adding themes into the text adventures. With better prompt engineering and utilisation of the best models to foster a closer connection to the text, Storyscape can become a true companion for those who want to augment their English skills.