Taskable

Helping special needs children with their educational needs, making something that helps them become more comfortable with learning but also encourages them to find learning more fun and interactive

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Inspiration

Structured and supportive environments are especially important in special education settings. TaskAble was created to help autistic students navigate daily classroom routines with greater independence and confidence. Our inspiration came from the firsthand experiences of our team member, who works extensively in labs that seek to learn about autistic children and their educational needs. We discussed a product that he believed would be useful in his research lab and the challenges they face while working in this environment. Through his experiences, we gained insight into the importance of clarity, predictability, and positive reinforcement in learning environments.

Rather than building a simple task list, we wanted to design a system that actively guides students through activities with clear, manageable steps and consistent encouragement—helping create a calmer, more structured classroom experience for both students and teachers.

What It Does

TaskAble is a web-based educational platform designed specifically for autistic students. It features two synchronized interfaces that work together in real time:

Teacher Dashboard: Teachers can create, assign, and remove tasks, manage a roster of students, and start or pause sessions. They can also track each student’s progress, including emotional check-ins and earned rewards. The teacher can also use an integrated AI tool to generate task substeps. This dashboard is password-locked with the password “teacher”.

Student View: Students see a simplified, distraction-free, view-only interface displaying their active tasks. As they complete steps, they earn stars, log how they’re feeling, and use their rewards to grow trees in a virtual “reward forest,” reinforcing progress through positive visual feedback.

How We Built It

We developed the frontend using React to create a responsive and intuitive interface that clearly separates teacher controls from the student view. For the backend, we used Firebase Firestore to enable seamless, real-time communication between dashboards. We structured collections to manage users, tasks, reward points, and emotion logs.

To make tasks more accessible, we integrated Google's AI Studio using Gemini 2.5 Flash. When a teacher enters a general instruction, the AI automatically breaks it down into smaller, student-friendly steps, ensuring clarity and approachability.

Challenges We Faced

Real-Time Synchronization: Ensuring that student screens were updated and synced up with the controls from the teacher’s dashboard, and pulling real-time data from the Firebase data to properly configure the information presented

Permanent and Temporary Variables: Ensuring that certain variables like trees and stars would remain saved even after refreshing or leaving the page, while other variables like the questions would be reloaded after each attempt. Designing the database schema to preserve the data across different sections without loss required numerous rounds of testing and planning.

Multi-User Data Management: Ensuring that each student has individualized progress tracking for both the virtual forest and emotional logs, along with the teacher being able to access each of them individually. Being able to sort the data by time and question also required us to place timestamps on our data and sort them accordingly.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We are proud of our ability to design a program simple enough for autistic students to use, yet sophisticated enough for teachers to teach, with intentional color and design choices to avoid overstimulating children while also keeping learning engaging, by combining firsthand experiences of one of our members with a desire to aid other teachers to create an entirely unique user experience.

On the technical side, we are especially proud of successfully combining real-time database synchronization with AI-powered task simplification to build a tool that feels genuinely practical and supportive. Watching the reward forest dynamically update and persist as students complete tasks — providing immediate, visual positive reinforcement — was a major milestone for our team.

What We Learned

Through this project, we strengthened our understanding of React state management in multi-view applications and gained hands-on experience working with Firebase’s real-time NoSQL database architecture. We also learned how to manage time effectively and meet deadlines

What’s Next for TaskAble

In the future, we plan to advance more features and advanced analytics for teachers, further leveraging AI to assist in tasks such as identifying patterns in emotional check-ins and trends in time spent answering questions. These features would help us improve our ability to personalize our help and give measurable checkpoints to encourage students to improve over time. We also hope to expand the reward forest to become more vibrant and versatile. We wish to incorporate more audio-visual supports to better accommodate students who prefer more multimodal feedback, leveraging the gamified system.

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