Meet The Team!
Computer Science is taught by Mrs. Taricco where we begin by learning HTML and CSS to make our websites, and then transition to the fundamentals of Java. Diving into loops, arrays, iterations, Boolean algebra, and much more, we also participate in competitions like the American Computer Science League(ACSL) beginning in January.
Developers: Shaina Premraj, Rohan Sarikonda, Sasha Nandyala, Vasudevan Lakshamanan
Advisor: Angela Taricco (Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science)
Humans rely on one factor over all others within the world today: language. Through bringing people together, society capitalized on languages, often English, to express ideas, thoughts, and beliefs. However, some individuals in society—for various reasons—struggle with learning a respective language in their area, which greatly decreases the opportunities that are present to them. Communication, which is a widely used and interpretive skill among people, is a skill that individuals must have the ability to do in order to thrive in society. Building on that, comprehension is a skill that people must have an understanding of in order to be able to communicate and effectively work with those around them.
Our app is designed for mainly students in elementary to middle school who are slightly familiar with English, but are seeking for an additional resource to work on their pronunciation. With the main goal to work as an aid to improve speaking abilities, this app was originally designed with the inspiration from refugee students however can be used on kids whose parents may not be comfortable with the language.
Talksalotl is a user-friendly, simple mobile application for users to practice not only their pronunciation skills, but also their reading comprehension skills. Designed primarily to help refugee children or any elementary to high school students who struggle with speaking English, this app can be used for a variety of different purposes. Users are able to choose between comprehension or pronunciation activities, and practice whichever area they feel they need the most help on. For comprehension, users are presented with a large variety of questions that likely pertain to their daily lives, improving upon their knowledge of common terms that they will use on a daily basis. In terms of pronunciation, users are given a random word each time, and then able to read the word and record it. Once recorded, the API SpeechSuper was used to help grade the users response and provide them with a score. This score will allow them to see how well they pronounced a certain word, and try again as many times as they want. In addition, a high score feature was incorporated to show users their progress, as well as affirmations at the bottom of the screen to encourage them. Overall, this app aims to assist children with little English knowledge be able to effectively communicate with not only their peers and teachers, but also people outside their communities.
There were two features that were a part of our minimum viable product, those being comprehension and pronunciation. For comprehension, questions were presented to users in a random order, encouraging them to use their common knowledge and become familiar with basic terms used on a daily basis. In terms of pronunciation, users are able to read a word and record their response to it, then get a score on how well they did and try again until satisfied.
The Stars exercise was also a favorite of mine because, like the Line Art one, I was able to implement math throughout it. As part of our unit on Static Arrays, we were asked to generate ten stars of differing sizes using trigonometry. After figuring out the math behind this exercise, I was able to add my touch to the assignment by adding color to each of the stars!
The Line Art exercise was one in which we had to write a program that would display straight lines inside rectangles from one side to a perpendicular side. The lines must be drawn so that the starting points of the lines on one side and the ending points on the other side are equidistant. This was one of my favorite assignments to code because I was able to combine my math knowledge with code. The satisfaction when this assignment was completed was like no other, and an accomplishment for someone like me who had minimal prior coding experience.