HackED: Listening Practice Everywhere™

(From left to right: Guodong, Yue, Chuning, me and Maoyuan)

Description: HackED is a hackathon centered around educational technology, hosted by the educational technology club at CMU. It features 14 interdisciplinary teams and a judge panel from across the CMU campus. Our team set out to tackle the lack of variety in listening practice material for ESL learners based on our own learning experience.

Role: I was in charge of directing our brainstorming session. Using concepts learned in class, I guided the team members to focus on our target learner. While other team members implemented the main features, I helped design the user interface and delivered the final presentation.

Result: Given the 8-hour time limit, we came up with a prototype application that took in an arbitrary English passage supplied by the user and generated a corresponding audio using a speech-to-text API, with features including "play by sentence"and "show correction" incorporated into our interface. Our team was rewarded second place, and everyone got a wireless headset of their choice (yay).