Submitted by Arya
Last week, we finally finished the coding for our basic premise for the website. With this, we also collected data on how much people liked our idea and if they liked our idea. Our feedback was pretty positive! This Thursday, we are having a forum at our school to present our idea to our community. Currently, we are preparing ourselves for what we are going to do when Thursday comes. We are feeling pretty prepared and are gathering data on our problem. Hopefully the forum goes well! Submitted by Elle Another week has passed by, and next week will mark our final days of CBL. Arya and Alex have continued to record videos of signs for our translator’s database, and their job this weekend is to collect people to be part of the group who will test the translator. These people will look for a couple of sentences to learn in ASL with our translator, and then will afterwards fill out a survey with questions such as “How many new signs did you learn?” and “How easy to use was our translator on a scale of one to ten?” Elle has figured out how to make the code display a video of a sign when the word corresponding with the desired sign has been entered! Apparently, Python (the coding language we our using; see our last post) doesn’t handle photo and video outputs without use of certain plug-ins (pre-written code that can be downloaded online and added to a program) that we do not have time to figure out how to use. This means that under normal circumstances, we simply cannot make Python display a video. However, Python does have a function in which it can open up a website in a web browser. As such, she programmed the translator to open a link to the video in our Google Drive folder showing the searched sign. However, because Macs do not automatically log you into Google when you open a new tab and you need to be logged in to see something in Google Drive, it only actually works on Windows at the moment. The code is shown below. However, as shown by a test of the program (which I planned to put here but I am having some difficulty doing so and as such will add later), which was on my computer (which is a Mac), it does still pull up the right link. So theoretically, it works. As a proposed fix, we could upload the videos to a site like Imgur where the user does not have to be logged in to view linked photos and videos. Some of these sites, I believe, actually recommend photos/videos that are often viewed after the one currently being viewed, so we could possibly use this to predict what word in a sentence the user wants to see next. Our next step is to make the program handle multiple inputs and outputs simultaneously. This is proving to be difficult, and it doesn’t help that time is running out fast!
Elle also began creating the poster that will display our project information (show below). Not much of it is done yet, but at least we have a plan. (The black and white lines will not be in the final poster, they are just there to help us keep everything aligned.) Submitted by Elle This week has been focused on making our solution a reality— or at least, taking the first steps towards doing so. We also cleaned up our website. Last week, Elle created a list containing many of the words that we would like our dictionary to be able to translate. On Wednesday and Friday (both Elle and Alex were out sick on Monday, and Arya spent the day working on the website), Alex recorded the signs that represent these words, Arya continued to polish the website, and Elle began researching what it would take to create the translator we had in mind.
Submitted by Alex
Last week our group focused on doing our solution document mostly feedback on my part. One day the teachers and some faculty members came into our science lab and we could pitch them our solution and get feedback from said teachers and faculty members. The feedback we were looking for were questions, concerns, and new ideas and we got a lot of good feedback in all three sections. Some good feedback in our concerns section was can you use adjectives and verbs etc.. and that’s really helpful to us because at least for me I wouldn’t have thought of that without the feedback we received. That’s really the only good one in that section of concerns. Now what was good from the questions section which was most helpful in my opinion were, what does this have to do with movement? Are you thinking about looking something up and seeing sets of videos from that? And lastly How do you plan to make this website/app are you gonna associate a symbol with a certain word? To me all of those are helpful and something to think about as we make our product. Lastly the most important things in the new ideas section were just about talking to some different people at our school about deafness. For example, talking to one of our teachers with a deaf mom or also, reaching out to what I didn’t even know existed, the sign language club, and ask them questions about ASL syntax and adjectives and verbs and stuff like that. Submitted by Arya
Last week, the group member who’s job it was to write this was absent due to sickness, so this blog post will cover the events of that week. Because we have next week off for President’s day, the post we publish next week will talk about what we did this week. Anyway, last week we worked on the solution to our problem. We decided how we are going to help the deaf communicate! First, we finalized our problem, choosing to focus on how to help the hearing communicate with the functionally deaf. We’ve decided that we are going to make dictionary-like website similar to Google Translate that translates English to ASL (American Sign Language). The main thing that separates this website from other English to ASL dictionaries is that you could type in a whole sentence and it will translate the whole sentence by translating and stringing together the words in that sentence. The idea is that the hearing can use this website to easily learn sign language, making communication between them and the deaf easier. But first we had multiple ideas like an app that changes ASL signs into English, an app that will help people who are deaf learn/improve with ASL. We eventually narrowed it down and that is our final idea. Submitted by Elle
As of 2016, approximately 12.8% of the US population were disabled. That’s about 42 million people, including many who are functionally deaf (have hearing loss to a handicapping degree). Comparatively, about 37.5 million adults in the US have some sort of hearing impairment. Hearing impairment can range from a slight decline in hearing quality late into life to an absolute lack of sound from birth. Even if you don’t know someone who is considered handicapped by their deafness, the chances are high that you know at least someone, such as a neighbor or grandparent, who is hard of hearing (has partial hearing loss). Nobody really stops to think of the real everyday troubles of being deaf other than “Oh, you can’t hear? That stinks.” We are a group of seventh graders from Windward school working on CBL (Challenge Based Learning), an annual science project part of our curriculum in which we are challenged to create a solution to a real-world problem in the community of our choosing based on the year’s theme. We narrowed down our topic from the theme of “Movement” to human movement, to disability, to sensory disabilities, and most recently, to deafness. We will close in further as we identify a smaller issue within the deaf community we wish to solve. But still remains the question: “Why deafness? And why should I care?” To answer this, take a moment to step into the shoes of Lucy, a close family friend of one of our group members. She is smart, amicable, and has taken upon her the exhausting job of raising an eight-year-old and a six-year-old. She is also functionally and completely deaf. Let’s say that her husband is out, the kids are busy, and she’s lonely. She can't just call a friend. She can just text someone, but she won't be alerted when someone responds by the ding of a notification. She doesn't mind. It just seems like normal life to her. In fact, she, like many members of the Deaf community, doesn't consider herself to be handicapped. But the fact of the matter is that, even though she deals with it like any other person deals with any other problem, a lot of really simple things we take for granted are a bit harder when you don't have access to one of your five senses. Our names are Alex, Arya, and Elle. We are trying to help our community, our friends and family, because it takes everyday people like you, me, or Lucy to solve everyday problems. |
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