Build-a-Book

What it does

Build-a-Book is to be used as an educational platform, putting the creative process in the hands of parents. Starting with a simple and brief prompt, our software can craft a personalized and immersive story for children. Parents will have an original tale to tell, paired with a digital book, full of unique and animated images. Build-a-Book blends education and creativity, transforming learning into a comprehensive experience for both parents and children.

Our inspiration

Our inspiration for Build-a-Book begins with the desire to converge education, storytelling, and creativity. Drawing influence from the heartfelt moments we’ve experienced with our parents as children, we opted to create software that would reduce the gap between technology and human emotion. We believe education and imagination should strongly intertwine, to make learning a creative journey for both kids and their parents. Build-a-Book’s objective is to continue to foster loving moments amongst family, in a world of digital proficiency.

How we built it

Using Stability AI and Open AI, our team was able to generate a personalized, multi-sentence story, beginning with a single, basic prompt. We seamlessly integrated the AI-generated images and text into our front end to offer our users an ideal experience, also enabling them to smoothly flip the pages of the customized storybook. Our project was created with the use of React, Flask and Open AI!

Challenges we ran into

While working on the frontend, we encountered a challenge with the library we had chosen. Since the library was relatively old and we were loading a large amount of information, it made the application crash repeatedly. We spoke to a mentor, who confirmed it was an issue with the library, and we opted to switch out the library for a more modern one.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, our team is proud that we were able to bring our idea to life and execute on the various features we had planned on adding. This project was a significant challenge and we weren’t fully positive that it would be possible to finish in 24 hours, so to have an end product that is nearly exactly what we had imagined, is a great accomplishment. Bonus: the team is exceedingly proud of our teammate for having built a strong animation for the site’s homepage.

What we learned

Throughout this experience, our team has acquired a diverse set of skills. We’ve focused on the intricacies of React, grasping how to incorporate backend functions into our frontend design and we've learned how to generate images using Stability AI, furthering our skills with Open AI. Overall, it has been a significantly fulfilling experience, enabling us to gain valuable knowledge in the realm of AI!

What's next for Build-a-Book

Ideally, we would love to add further customization features to offer parents more control over the creativity behind the tales. For example, an option to edit a story after it has been created or while it is being generated would increase the parents’ satisfaction with the end result. Similarly, adding the ability for children to choose different “paths” during the storytelling would make the experience more interactive for the reader, much like existing books that allow readers to “choose their own story.”

If this idea were to be commercialized, a subscription system would be beneficial to the growth of our project, beginning with an offer of a free trial for one children’s story, and following with a monthly cost of 4.99$.