The DKO team is striving to help their project partner, Deaf Kids Code, to make STEM education accessible to deaf and hard of hearing students. We have formed a partnership with Khan Academy to translate a thousand of their educational videos into American Sign Language (ASL). Once the goal of a thousand videos is met, Khan Academy has agreed to make ASL an official language option on their website.

 At the beginning of Spring 2017, our team began manually translating Khan Academy tutorials into ASL by hiring professional translators. Throughout this process, our team realized that it was inefficient and expensive to be a sustainable system. Thus, DKO came up with the idea to develop an open-source platform for Deaf educators to contribute to the translation project. Currently, we are about half-way through our web development. We plan on launching the open-source platform in Spring 2019.

Our project partner is Blake Widmier, who is the founder of Deaf Can! Coffee. He is based at a school for the deaf in Kingston, Jamaica. He and some of the students started off making coffee as a hobby and it has slowly grown into a business; they now have a coffee shop on the school campus where they train the students in the art of being a barista. The goal is to train the students to be the best baristas in Jamaica, thus providing a way for the students to provide for themselves in an otherwise tough environment. The DCC team's goal is to create a huller that removes parchement from coffee beans and is designed with a deaf user in mind; with this huller, the students will not have to remove the parchment by hand, saving hours of time, and can instead focus on learning the other aspects of the coffee making process. Our huller is specifically for Blake and Deaf Can! Coffee, but if we are able to make a cheap and effective product, we could also try to see if small scale farmers would be interested in it.

Our team project will result in a prototype for a new Tempo Trainer designed with deaf swimmers in mind. This product is being created for deaf swimmers, specifically a high school swimmer named Katie. A successful product could also be shared among other competetive deaf swimmers around the world to help them train and improve. We are working on this project because of the lack of adaptive training technology for deaf swimmers. Swimmers with normal hearing use tempo trainers (small devices that beep to help the swimmer keep a stroke pace), but there is a lack of similar technology for deaf swimmers.

Our team also worked with Deaf Can Coffee. Communication can be difficult between employees and customers who are unfamiliar with Jamaican Sign Language (JSL). In order to address this issue, our team developed an an intuitive ordering application that has a recommendation system to guide new customers through the ordering process, as well as a quick full-menu order page for returning customers to place their order with ease. In addition to these features, our application displayed the JSL hand signs to communicate your order or any questions you have to the cashier. By providing customers the opportunity to engage in sign-language firsthand, our project raised awareness for the Deaf community.