The Reagan Soundboard

Our team built a sound board to assist students in expressing their emotions!

Nonverbal and semi-verbal students at Reagan HS often struggled with expressing emotions on a daily basis. This made it difficult for students to go about their day learning and for teachers to assist these students in a proper manner.

After discussing various ideas with the Special Education Director at our school, we settled on a large emoticon-based board with speakers that students could easily go up to and express how they were feeling.

The board has 8 emoticons representing different emotions. When a student touches one of these emoticons, an electric signal is passed to the central microcontroller which activates the two speakers that can be seen in the center. These speakers voice out how a student is feeling using recorded responses we recorded with the help a fellow Reagan voice.

I loved working on this project because it helped many of my fellow students, and I was able to learn, for the first time, how to work with hardware and microcontrollers.