1st out of 112 teams · VTHacks · Sep 2025

Point its camera at any printed book and it reads the pages aloud, made for kids who can't see them. The child talks to it too, asking what a word means or what just happened in the story, with no buttons or screens to find.

Why it won: Kids who are read to regularly hear 290,000 more words by kindergarten than kids who are not, and a million Americans are completely blind. It checks that a real book is actually in the frame before it starts, so it never invents a story that is not on the page. Everything works by voice alone, because its users may never have seen a button.