Team Name: Hello World
Project Title: LiteraShare
Project Type: Mobile App
Project Link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/6hS4rajH
Video Link: https://bit.ly/4j5krrn
Write Up:
According to a 2024 study by the National Literacy Institute, 54 percent of adults in the United States were found to have a literacy below 6th-grade with a wide-gap between females and males. This will only get worse as our country faces a teacher shortage, book banning, and socio-economic conditions that make literacy more difficult to achieve. Children from poorer families have less access to books and well-funded schools which contribute to adult illiteracy. Low-literacy at an early age, and beyond, contribute to a lack of economic success, health and well-being, civic engagement, and social inequity.
LiteraShare aims to solve this problem by making reading a bonding opportunity for children and adults. LiteraShare generates a book pair for a young reader and their favorite adult to read together. The book pairings are age-appropriate recommendations that share a common theme such as: self-discovery, resilience, or chasing dreams. Once the user selects a book pairing, they can generate a list of questions to help cultivate a discussion with their fellow reader.
Book pairings can be generated randomly, based on genre, or based off of a book title. If the user chooses to enter a YA book title, it will generate an adult book of the same theme. It also works vice-versa.
A young reader (13+) or an adult can create a LiteraShare account and generate book pairings.
Read Across America shares that “talking about books helps boost a love of reading.” Having someone to read with and discuss books with can help both the adults and young adults improve their literacy. A research study from Florida Atlantic University found that young readers enjoyed participating in book clubs and that choosing their own book titles and book partners helped keep them motivated.
LiteraShare not only gives users a book recommendation, discussion questions, and an age-appropriate recommendation for their book buddy, but in the future, LiteraShare will partner up with libraries to help people easily locate the book pairs in their local libraries once they’ve selected them. This will also make it easier to remove the financial barrier to reading.
To make my vision for LiteraShare possible, I had to learn to use XCode because I wanted to build a real iOS app. However, XCode only works on MacBooks, and I didn’t own one. My laptop of five years had just died, so I got a loan from my parents and bought a MacBook Pro. Now, I had to learn to navigate a Mac environment on top of adapting to XCode’s multi-tabbed interface and learning Swift programming language.
The biggest challenge was figuring out how to get the books to be paired. Initially, I thought I could do it based on a dataset but I would have to create a match key for every book I wanted to use. That would take forever and it would limit the content. I did a bunch of research and discovered I could get really good results by using a ChatGPT API key. The only problem was that I had no idea how to do this.
After several hours of YouTube videos and asking ChatGPT itself I was able to figure it out! It felt like such a weight off my shoulders. Once I got the API Key to work, it unlocked the rest of the project. I engineered a prompt that I could edit and use for different aspects of my app. Figuring out that part of the project was the most challenging, but also most rewarding part.
AI was used for different aspects of my project. I am not an artistically inclined person but I had a vision for the LiteraShare logo, so I described it to Canva AI and I was able to produce my logo. Another place I used AI was to run the project. My project is running on a ChatGPT API Key which pairs the books and generates the discussion questions. ChatGPT also served as my “duck” during this project.
Because I was working alone, it was important for me to keep a journal to track issues, time spent, and tasks that I needed to accomplish. I developed LiteraShare by myself over the course of six months and 78 hours. It was challenging to do this between my rigorous school curriculum, planning my Quinceñera, and family obligations, but I am proud of what I accomplished. I look forward to using the prize money to hire help to make LiteraShare even better, including learning to hide the API Key so it’s more secure.
