BabbleBot: Trine students form company to continue app development

BabbleBot has come full circle, and its journey is continuing.

Built as a Trine University senior design project, BabbleBot is an artificial intelligence-based application that generates customized stories and pictures using phonemes and sight words students need to practice.

The app is based on Science of Reading (SoR) principles, which teaches students to read with sound combinations rather than pictures.

The original project was so successful that the Trine students who designed BabbleBot formed their own company and are now working with other Trine students to add more features to the app.

Education, computer science collaboration

BabbleBot got its start as an idea that came out of SoR sessions conducted by Trine’s Franks School of Education (FSOE).

“In those conversations, (while we were) brainstorming ideas of what can we do, the idea of building an app came up,” Fremont Elementary School principal Eric Bryan said at the time.

FSOE collaborated with the CSIT 483 Senior Capstone class taught by Dave Corcoran, adjunct faculty and entrepreneur in residence, to launch a senior design project.

“The initial idea was to create an online repository of ‘decodable texts,’ or short stories that incorporated Science of Reading-based principles, allowing educators to upload and download these stories for use in their classroom,” said Connor Heitman, a member of the senior design team.

As the project progressed, the group worked with project sponsor Alecia Pfefferkorn, assistant professor in the FSOE, to add functionality, which led to the use of AI technology to create stories and images based on student interests.

“The idea was that as the student reads aloud into their device's microphone, the tool picks up the audio, transcribes it and displays it to the teacher, along with what individual phonemic structures and sounds the student struggles with, so that the teacher could better understand how to help the student and the class along, individually as a student and collectively as a class,” Heitman said.

In April, the team launched a pilot phase in a kindergarten classroom at Fremont Elementary. Following the pilot, the team used feedback from the teacher and students to add new features and improve others.

Babbling onward

Over the summer, Heitman and Kyczar Aalbregtse, who was also part of the senior design team, continued development of the app. They revamped the layout and theme to appeal more to children, gamified some of the interfaces and provided more interactivity and customization for the students and their profiles.

In October, they formed a company, Rising Tide Learning LLC. Trine University transferred ownership of BabbleBot to the newly formed entity.

Corcoran reached out to see if the company would be interested in sponsoring a senior design project for the CSIT 483 Senior Capstone class. Heitman and Aalbregtse gladly accepted the offer.

Heitman said Trine seniors Anthony Hentz and Mohammed Tariq, both computer science and information technology majors, have been tasked with documenting data flows and code structures within the app, developing design mockups for future features and researching industry trends.

“They were also given a long-term project of developing an integrated solution for BabbleBot to better assist teachers in instructing ESL students who may have a higher proficiency in a language other than English, such as Spanish or Arabic,” Heitman said. “There is a growing percentage of teachers who claim to be under-equipped to instruct and help these students, and there is a massive opportunity for a platform like BabbleBot to help bridge the communication gap between these teachers and students.”

The company is continuing to develop the app, working to improve speech recognition, add standardized SoR-based scope and metrics and add more opportunities for teachers and administrators to customize BabbleBot and measure student progress.

“We want BabbleBot to be a safe, fun, and accessible learning experience for students of all backgrounds,” Heitman said.

Next steps

Rising Tide plans more pilot programs at elementary schools this spring to continue gathering feedback. They are aiming for a public release of BabbleBot by the fall.

An advisory board consisting of FSOE faculty members Pfefferkorn, Amy Heavin, Chelsea Superczynski and Alison Todd continues to guide the company on Science of Reading and current industry trends.

“This collective group brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to our SoR-focused orientation and has been great in providing guidance to how BabbleBot can align more closely with how teachers and educators think, and how BabbleBot can better utilize these ideas,” Heitman said.

Heitman said Corcoran also “has been a great mentor throughout this process.”

“He has been crucial to BabbleBot's growth and development, constantly offering assistance to Kyczar and myself as we've gone through this process,” he said.

Jason Blume, assistant vice president for Innovation One, which helped coordinate the senior design project and navigated the intellectual property transfer, said BabbleBot reflects a new evolution the entrepreneurial opportunities for Trine University students.

“This is the first time that current students have created a legal entity for the purpose of commercializing a product developed as a senior design project, but we don’t think it will be the last,” Blume said. “With the many opportunities Trine students have to apply their skills to real-world programs, the potential for innovation is unlimited.”