She Solved a Friend's Problem. Now, Her Games Are Changing Education for Blind Students Nationwide.
Crystal Yang's story is pretty amazing, I think. It shows how a simple idea can really grow and help a lot of people. It’s not every day you hear about a high school project having this kind of reach, is it?
How a student’s audio-based learning platform is helping blind and visually impaired students
Crystal Yang, who just graduated high school in the Houston area, made an educational game platform Audemy. It's for blind and visually impaired students, specifically. Her story really shows how being empathetic and just tackling a problem directly can create some really useful things for education.
It all started from something she noticed. Her classmates were all playing Wordle every day. But her blind friend couldn't play because of how visual the game is. "All my classmates love to do is playing Wordle," Crystal remembers. When she saw her friend was left out, she spent her summer figuring it out. "I used some AI algorithms to make sure the computer could understand speech as well as talk back to the user. And I made Wordle purely audio based," she explains. That's a pretty neat solution, if you ask me.
From a Single Game to a National Platform
What started as a game for one friend got much bigger, pretty quickly. After it worked well with her classmate, Crystal saw a larger need. She likes computer science and business, so she combined those interests to really expand her efforts. Today, her platform has audio-based games. Around 7,000 blind and visually impaired students use it. That's almost one in five students like that in the United States. It's also used in 26 schools.
To get that far, she talked to educators. "The community of blind and visually impaired teachers is super supportive, always looking for new tech," Crystal said. Working with teachers and schools helped her make the platform better. It now has 16 AI-powered games. These games teach math, language, and other important skills.
The Importance of Collaboration
Crystal's work has gotten a lot of help. She got to go to the ISTE conference. Intel sponsored her after she won the Intel Global AI Festival. She also really credits people like John Castillo. He's a teacher at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. He helped a lot with making sure her games worked with screen readers and other assistive technology that was already out there.
These partnerships show how student projects can really benefit from mentors and support from bigger groups. "They’ve been super supportive, helping me after I won the contest with scaling," Crystal said about her partners. It really does take a village, even for something starting small.
Looking Ahead: Expanding Accessibility
Crystal's idea for the platform keeps growing. She's working on adding new things for blind and visually impaired students.5 This includes a teacher dashboard so they can track student progress. She also wants to add new content. Think science topics, like weather and states of matter. Her goal is to build a complete learning tool. One that's accessible for both students and teachers.
The platform might even have more uses. Could the audio-based design, which is conversational, also help students learning English as a second language? "Perhaps people who don’t speak English that well, who want to practice English, could be able to talk to a computer in that way and still be able to play a game," Crystal agreed. It shows she sees the potential for wider uses.
A Community of Support
Crystal knows how important her parents, teachers, friends, and partners were to her success. Their encouragement and feedback kept her going with the platform. "I’m super grateful for them. They’re very supportive," she mentioned.
Crystal is getting ready to study business and computer science in college. But her work already shows that students can really fill needs in education. Her focus on inclusivity is making education better for thousands of people. It definitely proves that age doesn't stop you from making a real difference.