Story Snaps

Inspiration

Children are reading less and less and their language arts skills are declining as a result. We aimed to come up with a fun and engaging way to get young students interested in reading.

What it does

Story Snaps is a mobile app that allows children to upload their drawings or other images and generate a story from them. They can choose to generate a short story from one image or add multiple images to the same story, creating their own "picture book." Additionally, the app possesses the following features:

Ability to save stories to local memory
Ability to continue from existing stories
Math, science, or history facts incorporated into stories
Ability to delete stories

How we built it

The app is built using React Native and Expo for the frontend and Flask for the backend. We called a Google Cloud Vertex AI API endpoint with an image to text model to generate the stories and used the Expo file system API to save the stories. We also used Docker to deploy the backend on Google Cloud's Cloud Run platform, so it can run needing to be manually started.

Challenges we ran into

Our members had limited prior experience with mobile application development, so it was pretty challenging to learn a lot of the technologies while developing the application. We also struggled to decide where to start, since many components of the app are intertwined and depend on each other to function properly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the user interface and functionality we managed to implement into the app. We met all of our original goals for the app and were even able to add some features on top of that.

What we learned

We learned a lot about mobile app development. Many of our members also learned how to collaborate effectively using Git through branching and merging.

What's next for Story Snaps

We plan on deploying the app on mobile platforms. We also plan on allowing users to save their stories as PDFs, so they can be easily printed. We also plan to allow users to share their stories and read others' stories on the app. Lastly, we aim to add a feature to allow users to easily look up words they don't know in the app to further assist them in developing their vocabulary.