Social Impact BuildFest Reflection
Going into the Social Impact BuildFest, I knew little about haptics or DataFeel. I was also unaware of the atmosphere of competition in a hackathon. So, I went straight to the resources provided through the four videos explaining everything.
I went in on Friday at 3:30 PM very nervously as I had no team and I didn’t really know anyone. But luckily I found a great team that I got a long really great with for those upcoming three days. Since my coding knowledge is almost non-exisent, my main role in the group was to tackle the social impact aspect of our prodect: how do we get people back into libraries and how can we advocate for banned books? I also got to be the more creative side of our product and that was really fun.
What was our product?
Our product was a wristband, called the Reactor, it is an accessible tool that connects the reader to the experience of the book. The Reactor follows along as the user reads aloud and reacts to specific trigger words within the book that indicate temperature, color, and actions. Temperature-related words like “cold” or “chill” will trigger the cooling function of the Reactor, while words related to heat or warmth will trigger the heating function. The band coordinates colors with the book by emitting soft light, and certain actions will be indicated with a slight vibration. The Reactor will have two modes:
Reading Mode: Group Sessions
- Staff member reads to multiple kids. Depending on the word read, The Reactor acts accordingly. Individual Reading
- Kids read out loud to themselves. Depending on the word read, The Reactor acts accordingly.
Learning Mode: Individual Reading
- Kids must read a page correctly for The Reactor to give a response.
We are hoping our product can be used as a focusing tool that will engage kids to read in libraries specifically banned books. Like the The Lorax as we demo’d in our video and presentation. As we continue development, the Reactor could also be used as a pronunciation checker for kids, as the action of the wristband will only work if the word is pronounced correctly. The future of this product includes adding more vocabulary (including words from important banned books), further development on the frontend so the software can be an easy-to-use app, as well as a social media campaign linking the wristbands with famous and nostalgic banned books to help raise awareness and concern for local libraries. Eventually, this product could be sold and scalability seems feasible.
Some videos of us testing the heating, cooling, and color haptics of our provided DataFeel pods!
I am happy to say that we were able to place third place!! From someone who walked into BuildFest hoping to just gain some knowledge and some experience to really caring and believing in our product to becoming a group that was able to produce some results, it was a very fun and enriching experience. I had so much fun during the three days, and I would definitely do this again and recommend it to everyone, even if they don’t have any coding knowledge, there was definitely a place for me on my team. As the third-place team, I am excited to demo our product at the TXI portion of SXSW!
