Scribe wins Rep. John James’s 2023 Congressional App Challenge in Michigan’s 10th District

When asked what inspired the creation of Scribe, the students said, “Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw that over 70% of all students, from primary to higher-level education courses, made the switch to digital learning. Over time, this meant that more and more students transitioned to using online resources in place of traditional learning methods. Many teachers, for example, now require students to photograph and submit their work digitally. However, due to the large number of assignments and images to review and most students’ lack of access to high-quality cameras, many teachers have reported having to work longer hours and spend more time grading and checking assignments. For example, one survey showed that teachers were burdened with an increased workload of more than 25% in just the last couple of years. After hearing this insight, we found that an application that would streamline this process, transforming student work into an accessible, legible, and convenient format, would be a massive benefit to many educators.

Furthermore, in an age dominated by technology, the limitations of handwriting for students have become all too apparent in recent years. For high schoolers like ourselves, handwriting itself is very inefficient in terms of readability and shareability. In fact, studies have found that the average adolescent writes at only 75% legibility when compared to the text’s typed substitute. While the appeal of handwritten notes is there, it is often much more convenient to have a format of text that can be easily copied, edited, and sent to other people. The practicality of digital text formats not only streamlines collaboration but also ensures that our notes and assignments remain legible, organized, and accessible when needed. In our own experiences, we often found ourselves wishing that there was a means to easily store all of our handwritten notes and work, while also having access to a suite of features that we could use whenever we felt the need.

Due to these reasons, we realized there was a need for an efficient, optimized, and practical application for converting handwritten text into a typed format. Thus, Scribe was born.”