At TigerHacks this year at the University of Missouri, Olivia Sandvold, Ben Weinberg and I, worked together to build “Playground News”: A web app for elementary/adolescent aged kids to read and interact with curated news, and motivate family conversation.
Our goal was to help kids increase their literary ability, learn relevant topics through current news, and then encourage dialog over those concepts with parents through provided parental controls and data-driven tooling with insight reports.
During local hack day this December, I developed an Alexa skill for students to check bus times through campus transportation. It was a solo project I set out to complete in 10 hours, and as of January of 2019, over 30 students are still actively invoking the skill every week.
Continue readingThis year for Mother’s Day, I decided to take an old digital photo frame we had lying around the house, and throw in some improvements. Originally, the frame had a small amount of internal memory, and could store low-resolution images loaded in from a flash drive. The process of moving files over was tedious, and I wanted anyone in my family to be able to easily contribute to the rotation of photos. Going away from school, I thought it would be neat to be able to easily update the frame with new photos, no matter where my siblings were in the world.
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