UoA Student Team Wins Award for Excellence at SPAJAM 2016

Over the weekend of July 2-3, 2016, Smartphone App Jam (SPAJAM2016 *) was held. The entry from Tohoku area was the UoA student team "MATSU OK ROCK," which won the Award for Excellence.

12 teams which won regional qualifiers and special selection participated the finals. The theme was "sound." Within 25 hours, participants created smartphone apps along this theme before. Giving presentations on them.

MATSU OK ROCK's work "SUTAKARA -Study Karaoke-" can write lyrics of your favorite song with words that you want to remember. It is a unique language learning support app which creates parody songs. At the presentation, the members passionately sang the parody song which was created by the app and the audiences got excited.

Award of Excellence, Finals
Team: MATSU OK ROCK
Members: Naoyuki MURATA (4th year undergraduate), Ryoma HIRASAWA (4th year undergraduate), Tsubasa WATANABE (1st year Master's), Yusuke NAKAYAMA (4th year undergraduate), Takuya IIZUKA (4th year undergraduate)
Work: SUTAKARA - StudyKaraoke-
Introduction of the work: Given the theme of "sound," we put our eyes on phonetic learning which includes e-learning. Parody songs for memorizing the chemical symbols of the elements and the dynasties of China already exist. However, parody songs do not cover all subjects that need to be memorized. Given this, we thought it was necessary to create parody songs based on the subject each individual needs to each individual's learning content learn so as to promote easier learning. So we created an app that can generate parody songs from your favorite songs by transforming their lyrics into the words or content you would like to remember. By analyzing the songs and lyrics that users choose, a server that using Yahoo's API provides lyrics and video UR which were replaced using scraping and morpheme analysis processing on the lyrics.

Comments:
Yusuke NAKAYAMA
I was in charge of the presentation and iOS front end. It's all by the members' efforts. Before I took to the stage to give the presentation, I told my team "Leave the rest to me. I'm going to take you guys to Silicon Valley (because the Grand Prize is a Silicon Valley tour). " I was thrilled to show the app nicely. Even now, I feel it was an excellent presentation.

Tsubasa WATANABE
We formed this team from a group of friends that are always together. wWe started to participating in hackathons this April. I am proud of the award of excellence at the final although it was a challenge in a short term . Next year, I would like to win the Grand Prize with the same team members.

Naoyuki MURATA
We had good members on our team. I enjoyed the final and won the award. I learnt my weakness, so I would like to continue making the same diligent efforts without being too carried away by this result.

Takuya IIZUKA
At the final, I was reminded of the strengths of our team. Our ideas, skills, and the amount of accumulated knowledge of the entire team are way beyond those of my own. Nothing but all united together and each of us played the role very well. These things brought about this result. The confidence that I gained this time will be an asset for future activities.

* SPAJAM: "Hackathon," a portmanteau of "hack" and "marathon", is an event where participants who are interested in the same theme work on software development together.
Related news: UoA Student Teams Win Grand Prize and Other Awards at SPAJAM 2016 Sendai Qualifier