October 16, 2020

Capturing second place for their project titled "FaceAnalyzer," the team of Madu Sharma and Kanishk Garg from Plano East Senior High competed at PSI Hacks among 177 participants and 30 projects. This virtual hackathon took place from October 10–11. Read more about their award winning project.

Madu Sharma and Kanishk Garg, Plano East Senior High School

FaceAnalyzer is a web application that uses Affectiva, a cross-platform real-time face recognition toolkit. Affectiva is used to analyze the students' faces and provide real-time statistics of their mood and attention. FaceAnalyzer's main function is to play a sound when the student is not looking at the screen. This alerts the student to get back on task and pay attention to the teacher. 

PSI Hacks provided students with a platform to create novel applications to inspire students to study under a distance learning model. Winning projects were technologically innovative new applications that could transform the distance educational system. A total of $22,474 in prizes from sponsors were awarded.

Project Inspiration

The team describe their inspiration: “The problem that is facing online classrooms today is that students are lacking attention. Also, teachers are having trouble finding out what the best way is to regain that attention...Current solutions require the teacher to be paying attention to the students’ screens, which is not always possible in the middle of a lesson. Also, to get the attention of the student back, class must be interrupted which wastes a lot of time...Seeing these problems on a day-to-day basis inspired us to make a solution.”

Judging Criteria

• Creativity
• Technical complexity
• Impact, how realistic is your application in terms of making an actual impact on our educational system?
• Quality