The team is currently working in the second of a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation. The device's first-generation prototype was an amalgamation of commercial, off-the-shelf technology but showed enough promise that Hayden received some seed funding from the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing, where he had been volunteering. In the video window the user can "drag" the live picture and the motors on the camera will pan and tilt to readjust its position. On one half of the screen is a digital note pad, where users enter handwritten notes on the other half is live, streaming video from a camera that points at a target such as a chalkboard. This allows low-vision students to keep up with note taking compared with their sighted peers." "The basic problem the Note-Taker solves is that, unlike existing assistive technologies, it's portable, requires no installation in the classroom, and there's no delay when transitioning between taking your notes and viewing the board," Hayden said. The six team members garnered a prize of $8,000 and tablet computers. "The reason the tablet PC was so important to our device is that handwritten notes are critical for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) classes what happens when you run into figures, diagrams or math notation?"Īfter an initial down-select to 10 and then finally two in the Warsaw final, Hayden and Arizona State teammate Andrew Kelley took home first place. "It was as if the challenge was created just for our project," Hayden said. Teams were called upon to use touch and tablet technologies to improve access to education, which proved a natural for Hayden's team. The competition was stiff in Hayden's team category, touch and tablet accessibility - 50 teams from around the world had entered. The result, a device he built called the Note-Taker, has not only helped him in class but has earned him and his team members a major prize in the recent Microsoft-sponsored Imagine Cup, an international technology innovation competition held this year in Warsaw, Poland, that included about 300,000 student entrants from more than 100 countries. As a dual major, he couldn't wait for the state of the art to catch up to his needs, so he decided to do something about it himself. Hayden, born with a condition in which his optic nerves never fully developed, is legally blind, and has trouble keeping up with note-taking.įor many years, Hayden had used assistive technologies in the classroom, with limited success. However, the frenetic pace of note taking in senior-level classes proved frustrating. Three years ago, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory summer intern David Hayden decided to add a math degree to the computer science degree he was already pursuing at Arizona State University in Tempe. David Hayden (left) and teammate Andrew Kelley took first place in the touch and tablet technologies category in Microsoft's Imagine Cup international competition. David Hayden uses the Note-Taker device to keep up with his fully-sighted peers in classroom note-taking.
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