Signlingo - Master ASL The Engaging Way

Simple and elegant homepage
An example lesson where the user selects a word
Post-lesson congrats screen
The map of all of the lessons
Homepage scrolled down- short blurb about the website and some plans for users to buy (not implemented)
A fill in the blank question example
A rearrange question example

Inspiration

We wanted to build an education-related product from the start, the question was just what to do? After some deliberation, we had an idea, Duolingo but for American Sign Language. We did come up with a few more ideas but eventually decided that the ASL idea would be perfect given the time restriction.

What it does

Signlingo transforms learning ASL from a chore into a fun and engaging game. It offers a free platform where you can create an account and start exploring American Sign Language. With easy-to-follow exercises, you'll build a natural and intuitive understanding of ASL. Whether you're just starting out or brushing up, Signlingo makes the journey enjoyable!

How we built it

We split our team into 3 separate categories, Backend, Frontend, and Mixed. This allowed us to more effectively develop as we delegated those based on what we felt most comfortable doing to prevent any sort of roadblocks. We utilized Nextjs’s page router because we felt we could quickly get everything up and running. Given we needed videos for some of our questions we also wrote a quick scraping script to fetch videos from an ASL dictionary to supply us. We collaborated quite a bit between each other to build features we can build off of for better execution. Overall we did a good job working together to build our idea of a Duolingo but for American Sign Language.

Challenges we ran into

We did relatively well for this challenge in terms of writing code without too many issues, although we did run into a couple: Firebase, it was our first time using firebase for our auth and db. Even though we poked around with firebase’s sdk a bit earlier we still ran into minor difficulties that took some precious time to resolve. Styles, even though we used tailwind which we have plenty of experience with, we wanted to combine that with the new view transitions api to do sliding animations. We didn’t have much experience with this and couldn’t figure out how to implement it and in the end scrapped it and dealt with the time loss Time, we originally wanted to do an all nighter (for obvious reasons) but due to real life situations we ended up not doing it, that was a major time loss as we had downtime when nobody was working. Overall we had some ups and downs but managed to build a relatively competent product even with our fumbles.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although we ran into a few roadblocks, there's still a ton of things that we’re still proud of. Animations, we utilized the view transitions api and tailwind animations in order to create a smooth and seamless user experience. Firebase, with all team members primarily having experience working with structured databases (PostgreSQL), it was a rewarding challenge to pivot to the NoSQL structure of Firebase. Time Crunch, with two remote team members working across a time zone, coordinating work and personal commitments, led to lost time and slowed down development. Regardless, we managed to stay adaptable and push through to build something that we’re proud of.

What we learned

The primary thing we learned was firebase, it was our first time using it (we’ve tended to use supabase more) so it was a bit interesting working with a document based database rather than what we’re usually used to with a SQL one. We also learned a bit of ASL while developing this which was an added bonus.

What's next for Signlingo - Master ASL The Engaging Way

While we would love to continue building this, it’s almost certain that all of our existing code (potentially excluding the UI) would be deleted and rewritten, we’ve made multiple decisions that while fine for the hackathon, would be major tech debt if kept. We’re not quite sure if we’d want to continue this or not, if there’s a market for it then maybe we’d consider revisiting the project but it’ll likely just sit in a dormant state until someone decides to pick it up for fun.