Notecandy wins Rep. John Rutherford’s 2024 Congressional App Challenge in Florida’s Fifth District

When asked what inspired the creation of Notecandy, the student said, “In my health and wellness class, my teacher introduced me to something called ‘VARK,’ an acronym for the different learning styles of students. V means Visual learners, students who learn best through images and objects that help them recall class content. The following letter, A, is for auditory learners. These types of learners learn best when they hear information. The R encompasses most learners because it stands for Read/Write – which means learners who can learn content most optimally when they write notes in class or when they read information. K stands for Kinesthetic learners, who learn through physical motion-based activities. However, one key issue I noticed was that far too many of my classes (and most of the online college courses I watched) were solely lecture-based, where the teacher would speak information. This approach only includes students with common learning styles. I’ve observed some students, including myself, needing help determining what information to write down, leading to a struggle to understand all the critical content.

Another inspiration for Notecandy came from my personal experience working with a dyslexic and ADHD student in math and computer science over the past 4 years. Witnessing the challenges he faced due to his learning style and the limitations of traditional note-taking methods, I was driven to create a solution that could help him and others like him.

To solve both of these obstacles—difficulties in note-taking and the lack of a learning format that suited all of the VARK learning styles—I created Notecandy.

Notecandy solves the issue of focus and distraction by automatically transcribing lectures and helping users take notes if they need help keeping track of all the content. Moreover, Notecandy’s real-time speech recognition helps students who are stressed about copying every piece of information by allowing them to pay more attention to the lectures and letting the tool summarize the course content.

Notecandy’s versatility is a key feature, designed to cater to the diverse needs of students. It accepts input from a variety of sources, including uploaded audio, recorded lectures (which are transcribed within the app), uploaded PDF documents, or copy-pasted text content. This means students can learn from lectures, audio files, documents, articles, and more. In terms of output, Notecandy caters to VARK learning styles, generating video notes for visual learners, audio notes for auditory learners, and plain text notes for read/write learners.”