Pupils from a UK school won a trip to Las Vegas to attend Amazon's AWS Re:Invent tech event, where they showed off their new app to help deaf students in class.
Deaf and partially-hearing students often have difficulty making out what a teacher is saying in class, an issue that's been made worse by increased class sizes in recent years. Many deaf students learn to lipread, but this isn't always possible when the teacher is writing on a board and facing away from the students.
Students at Bishop's Stortford College in the UK have invented an app that helps solve this problem by automatically transcribing the teacher's words. The Connect Hearo app turns audio of the teacher's speech from an attached microphone into text and then transmits that to the students' mobile devices, allowing them to see what the teacher is saying from any seat in the room.
The app was built based on a competition brief by the Amazon AWS Get IT team, which asked entrants to develop an app to solve a real-world problem in their school or local community. Five students involved in creating the app were invited to attend the Amazon AWS Re-Invent Summit in Las Vegas earlier this month, which had an estimated 65,000 tech cmmunity members in attendance.
Around 45,000 pupils in the UK education system have moderate to severe deafness and find it difficult to hear their teacher. The team behind the app gave a presentation at AWS Re:Invent to an audience of tech community members, expert judges, and nine other finalist teams from other schools.
The school's Director of Studies Wendy Sharman commented on the app and trip: "This has been an interesting and exciting challenge for the children. They have had to identify a problem and think carefully about how they might solve it using technology. They have learned an incredible amount and we are particularly proud of their achievements. We look forward to seeing the app available to those who will benefit."
Source: Bishop's Stortford College, BBC News, Image (c) Bishop's Strotford College
