Judges found it a honour to put Franciscan seminary Maua at first place in technology with a project titled "Educating the deaf using speech recognition" in this year's Young scientists Tanzania competition. Students concerned with this were Francis Shirima who dealt with the technical part of the project and emplementation and Adolf Katambi who helped in researching.

This project mainly targeted helping deaf students to get a better education through easing communication between deaf students and their teachers and fellow students using computer's speech recognition technology. In this a deaf student can stay in the same class with other normal student and either there is a big screen infront of a class or the student has a personal computer with them, the computer program created by Francis will translate the teache's speech into both text and deaf sign language, further more the text displayed can be saved by the students for later use as notes.

The program was created using Javascript(a computer programming language), the Javascript algorithm utilizes google's speech recognition API to convert the speech into text and then find a match in a special inbuilt dictionary that is built within the program and contains deaf sign language photos. After finding a match of the speech the program gives the results to the deaf student.

Apart from teacher's speech the program can be used in discussion with fellow students as well in any other kind of communication, for example even in Television programs this program can be employed to translate the voices into deaf sign language, therefore this program/project is not lmited to education only but can be used in any field of human speech communication.

The students presented their project at the Tanzania's 2017 Young scientist competition that was done in Dar-es-salaam in August 2017. In this competition more than 70 schools participated with different project and Maua student's went back to school with the first price in technology category wich presented to them Golden medals, Tsh.750000 and a trophy.

Francis and Adolf explaining to the Judge.

Presenting the project at the YST competition is not all that was there for this project but Maua semianry is working hand in hand with Moshi technical secondary school which is a school with deaf students so as to make a good start of using this technolgy and later in other places in Tanzania and the world. And together with this computer program Francis designed a gadget that was not yet completed until the YST presentation day but right now completed, this is a wrist watch that will alert deaf people whenever thre is a dangerous noise such as thunderstorm and a car horn.

This is just among many science project that are done by Students at Maua semianry. The school intends to transform Tanzania and the world through science and technology.

Francis explaining the project to primary school students.