SAL Smart Mirror for Education

The Project

A smart mirror for classrooms. Displays essential information such as personalised timetables, weather, events, birthdays, announcements, etc. The mirror has facial recognition and greets students by name - saying good morning/afternoon depending on the time. It reminds students of the school values and gives encouraging and uplifting messages as well as wishing happy birthday on each class/staff member's birthday. 1) Why did we choose to make this project? We made this project because we wanted to apply our STEM skills to create a hardware project and do more than just program something. We wanted to make something cool that could be useful in the classroom. We have many ideas for the future of this project that would help reinforce many of the things that we focus on at school, such as our school values and overall health and wellbeing. 2) What did we find difficult while making this project and how did we work it out? The biggest challenge with our project was getting the modules to work properly after we added new ones or made changes. We had to delete the MagicMirror software and reinstall it again because we couldn't quite work out what was wrong. On our second attempt, we ran the mirror in server mode and were able to identify some very simple errors that we had made (indentation, missing punctuation, etc.). Once we fixed these, our modules started working again. Learning how to use the terminal to write code commands rather than clicking through files was difficult to start with but became much easier as we went on. Getting all the necessary resources together to finish the project was also a bit challenging. 3) Is there anything that we would differently or would add if I had more time? If we had more time, we would 3D print some brackets to finish mounting the monitor and the Pi to the frame. We would finish adding and changing apps that would suit our classroom application, which would be much easier and faster now that we've been able to successfully troubleshoot the problems we were having with the JavaScript code for modules. Specifically, we would create modules for many things that we use regularly at school, such as Champion Life (with quick check-ins using facial recognition and touch screen - two more additions we would make given more time and resources), Behind the News, school timetables/special events, deep breathing exercises, and many others. We would like to add voice and gesture command functions and add speakers in addition to the touchscreen and camera.

View this project on YouTube