SPELMAN INNOVATION LAB FELLOWSHIP: PARTICIPATION IN A RESEARCH GRANT OR FELLOWSHIP (GOLD 7 POINTS) - CLASS OF 2028

Participation in a Research Grant or Fellowship (Gold 7 points)

This fall, I was selected as a Spelman College Innovation Lab Fellow. I am incredibly passionate about educational technology, and this served as the perfect opportunity for me to develop the solution I’d been brainstorming while learning the necessary skills to execute it. My venture, Granted Reading, is an AI-powered worksheet generator for special educators that helps them individualize reading worksheets to a student’s age, reading level, and interests. I came up with this idea in response to a problem I frequently encountered in tutoring students with learning disabilities. Older students with lower reading levels often didn’t want to read texts for younger children and felt discouraged when they had to do so. I would use AI to write stories for my student that fit his reading level, but were about content relevant to his age group. In doing this, my student was much more excited to learn, but it was time-consuming and required multiple software to create a worksheet that my student would only use for a few minutes. To make an individualized reading curriculum accessible to all readers, I developed Granted Reading. 

When I first started the fellowship, I had very general knowledge of AI and how to use it in software development, but after collaborating with Innovation Lab faculty, doing my own research, and spending intentional time learning and debugging, I was able to create a customized chatbot by October. In November and December, I began getting familiar with frontend development, APIs, and started designing my user interface in Adobe Illustrator. During winter break, I made my largest breakthrough, standardizing my chatbot output to connect with a PDF generating API, and successfully generating my first custom worksheet baked on a user prompt. I continued testing and am now at a 90% success rate. 

This experience has been invaluable not only in catalyzing my journey into educational technology but in improving my confidence in developing software. Granted Reading is a tool under my larger company, Granted Technologies. My goal is to develop several software tools to help special educators make education accessible for students with learning disabilities. Before becoming an Innovation Lab fellow, Granted Reading seemed like a far-off dream. Now, my dream is coming to life, and I feel energized with every small improvement. 

Eden Wilson