Perch

Inspiration

• UN Development Goal #4: Quality Education
• UN Development Goal #10: Reducing Inequalities While brainstorming, we found an interesting way these two goals were intertwined.

It's simple: We all learn differently, and it unfortunately creates inequalities in the quality of our learning experience

• Everyone has a different learning style, and some have circumstances such as disabilities or language barriers, that actively impact their learning experience. For the same learning material or teaching method, some of us will learn better, and some will learn worse.

• For example, students often complain about the accents of teachers and the fact that they are speaking too fast or slow, which can hinder the learning process. People who do understand those accents correctly, on the other hand, won't have any problem attending the lectures.

Well, What academia fails to teach you, you can always learn it on the web... right?

• People primarily think of academic learning when Education is involved. When in reality, the web is also full of resources waiting for us to use.
• But there's still a problem: Most of those resources do not come in multiple formats to cater to different learning styles or special needs. If you find a good resource that unfortunately does not suit you, you either have to bear with it or look for another resource ##Our learning styles and special needs are holding us back from exploiting the educational potential of the web to its full potential
• So we looked for a way to make learning resources adaptable to everyone, no matter what their learning style or special needs are. ##What it does This web app takes learning resources (text, audio), and transforms them into different kinds of learning material that suit the user better.

How we built it

• Front-end: HTML, CSS, Bootstrap
• Back-end: Python (Flask, Gemini API, AssemblyAI, Eleven Labs API)

Challenges we ran into

• We first wanted to build our app on Android. But we had to pivot to web development because we wanted to use Python in the backend and couldn't find a way to connect a python backend to an Android App
• Most of our team members were new to Flask and Javascript
• Most of us are also new at integrating LLM APIs into websites

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• We successfully pivoted from Android to Web developments; Integrate multiple APIs
• Despite it being our first time with Flask, we managed to build a beautiful User Interface
• It was also our first time using LLM APIs, and the various other AI APIs we used

What we learned

• How to build a Flask App
• How to integrate a LLM API into a webapp

What's next for Perch

• More types of input: Allowing the users to upload videos, pdfs, and other types of files.
• More supported languages and accents
• More Options (Live language/accent translation; Generating Visual learning materials;...)