Sprout is both creative and innovative because it seeks to make something that is seen as tedious and make it fun and exciting by using existing technologies to build off of older ones. It ultimately creates a hands-on learning experience that has never been seen before with textbooks, thus making learning more enjoyable and effective. We firmly hold that students will recognize Sprout as an innovative product that may assist them with their own textbook comprehension efforts. Moreover, Sprout approaches this problem of textbook comprehension in a number of creative manners, from the auto-generation of notes to the creation of animated models.

Sprout is viable because it builds off of a system that has been in place for centuries. What we are fundamentally doing is transforming this system to more reflect the modern, technological times we find ourselves in. Therefore, our solution to the problem elucidated previously is directly linked with computer science and technological advancement. And, this solution certainly is not something that is out of scope. As we describe in the prototyping and other sections, Sprout is something that can genuinely be constructed and work effectively. The technology is all here; what ByteSized Cookies will do is further implement that technology to benefit another part of many peoples' lives.

Students around the world struggle with textbooks. Some can't maintain the attention it requires to read their dense passages, while others have trouble understanding the convoluted words in those passages in the first place. As a largely used educational tool, it is key that someone addresses this problem. We seek to do this with Sprout, using our own personal experience as students as well as feedback given back to us to develop a truly effective product that will allow textbooks to be accessible and helpful for all.

Sprout reimagines the process of learning, research, and studying by building on the foundations of the age old textbook. For decades, centuries even, textbooks have been used to contain images and words. But now, with Sprout, the usage of textbooks has been entirely reimagined to give users access to additional content that addresses the boring textbook's shortcomings. Sprout is here to make the sharing of information more exciting and interactive for all.

Many products implement different aspects of Sprout, but none have the scope to accomplish the same tasks as this product. For example, one of our competitors is Bookful. This product incorporates extra educational content such as videos, AR diagrams, audio, and other elements, but the drawback is that it requires the purchase of specific books produced by Bookful. Furthermore, the target audience for this product is clearly for children, as the company produces interactive children's books. This is reflective of a general theme we saw while researching, which is that most interactive books that use technology out on the market today are primarily for children and children's books. Of course, our target market is completely different. Another similar product is Clickable Paper by Ricoh USA. This product allows customers to create pamphlets with interactive information that can be accessed through an app, but again requires the creation of specific content to work with the application. This product is also mostly oriented toward marketing, whereas Sprout is more focused on education and content for users. Even with all of the technology available, no product has incorporated all of the elements unique to Sprout, which is what makes our product so special. Links to the competitors mentioned here as well as others we found are in the attached document.

Another thing that is important to mention is that, while many interactive textbooks have been created digitally, none from our research takes a paper textbook and then enhances its interactivity, apart from the few AR-based products we have mentioned. This is another point of innovation for our product: we maintain the paper aspect of textbooks (which some people appreciate) while also adapting it to a unique technological application, which is much more than just AR models.

Attachments

For our AR experience, we essentially just modeled a textbook with some of the features Spout has popping up around it, based on the content of the textbook modeled. While this does not present necessarily what we want the content to look like in the app, it gives a general sense of what Sprout has to offer and how it might work in an app. Thus, through this AR experience, judges and others viewing the project can become more familiar with our vision and what we seek to do.