CactusReading

The Project

Through the increase in the popularity of online reading, many people rely on online dictionaries to further understand the text. However, looking up a word manually is a great inconvenience as well as a form of distraction. This chrome extension automatically detects the difficult words for each user and provides the words’ associated definition with a mouse hover. The chrome extension can be customized by adding and removing personal difficult words and personal easy words. Also, the chrome extension offers a deeper level of analytics, including the system analyzing part of speech of the world, to further understand the definition of a selected word or sentence. The chrome extension is applied to a school/work setting to improve the working efficiency by providing a simple model to analyze the word definition; it is also useful for casual reading, especially to those that aren’t fluent in English. Following the strict SDLC model, the end of the testing stage reflects that most of the users gave positive feedback to the chrome extension with most of the comments centered around convenience and accuracy. Through alpha testing and a small sample of beta testing, the Chrome extension presents productivity improvement on difficult texts and even making the community more inclusive.

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Team Comments

I am always fascinated by using technology to solve problems. After returning from distant learning, the education system relies on technology much heavier than in the past. I saw an issue from a friend who spends hours every night looking up the words that he doesn't know for homework.

Going by the boundary of the Chrome extension is the most difficult part, where I am forced to use a certain format and programming language. Without a useful debugger, I had to look up solutions on Stack Overflow. I also had to document my code to ensure my understanding of each sub-process.

I would like to increase the efficiency of the program by finding a different data structure or a different way of defining the words. I would also like to focus more on the UI by making a neater one with more functionality and even an app version of the Chrome extension.