[Gacutie89]

Lets say you have a test tomorrow and your one of those people that have trouble studying...either you'r to lazy to make notecards, or it's just...hard....what if there was a computer.like thing where you scanned in the materials that your test was going to be over, and it made a study guide for you...EVER KID IN AMERICA would get one of these!

Reward: getting this product for free and recognition for the idea

[dmacdonald95]

To elaborate for this person in a little more technical sense that may allow it to get accepted:

- Implement OCR technology (OCR allows you to convert scanned in graphics containing words, such as scanned in pieces of paper into ASCII readable/editable text) into a program that will allow you to scan data. Once it has been scanned in the user should be able to choose the blocks of text that are questions, and the ones that are answers.

- The program should then save the data in a database and allow it to be recalled in flashcard format, or in multiple choice, or true/false, etc. depending on the type of data.

[Steve]

The OCR part is easy... but for the notecards, someone (be it human or machine) will need to go through the text, toss out the unimportant stuff, and rearrange the rest in a way that's visually appealing and easy to understand. If the user is supposed to do that, then we're talking about a simple OCR program followed by manual editing - already exists. If the AI is supposed to do that - well, that's quite a task! Not that I say it's impossible, but I don't see the approach to a solution here. At the moment, it seems more like a "Gee, I wish my car would do all the driving and my stove would cook a complete menu without me having to do anything" - I sure hope that this will be part of our future, but without a "how-to" there's actually not much new or innovative about it.

[dmacdonald95]

Well, what if the program included an intuitive way to select blocks of text and define them "questions" or "answers", and then it would automatically strip out the rest, and allow the user to print the "questions" and "answer" blocks of text in a predetermined format?

[Steve]

Well, at least from my time in school and at the university I remember that to sentences from books are virtually unusable for notecards - you have to digest and regroup the text to get a proper result (which is in fact also part of the learning process).

Then again that might just be me and my own learning process.