Maria Estela Godinez: Electronics for a Good Cause

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Maria Estela Godinez is currently studying high school in her hometown San Francisco del Rincón, México.  She lives with her mother, a single parent, and five other siblings.  Her passion is electronics and she is putting her passion to work for a good cause. 

Maria Estela built a glove that allows speech-challenged people to move their fingers in a similar fashion to Braille language and have those signals recognized by software that converts them into speech.   

She recently shared the stage with Intel Chairman, Craig R. Barrett, during his keynote at the Digital Leaders Forum as part of his Latin America trip.  She won several awards for her project at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair this past Spring. (Official Intel Press Release here)

One of my blog readers, Ricardo Carreon, a blogger living in South America and working for
Intel offered to translate an email interview I did with her in Spanish.

1. How did you get interested in electronics? 

The Deyabú project forced me to learn more and more about electronics.  The more I learned, the more I discovered how fascinating it was to me.  At the beginning I drew my designs mixing things like protoboards and connection diagrams.  I started to apply electronis without knowing exactly how they were used, but I was focused on trying to solve problems. Then in a summer course I learned how they were used, but really the interesting thing was to learn what happened when you applied electronics, in other words, the phenomenon that it produced. The more I know about electronics, the more passionate I get.  It has grown on me spectacularly.

¿como te comenzaste a interesar en  electrónica?

El proyecto Deyabú conforme comenzó, me exigía cada vez más electrónica, ahí la conocí y me resultó fascinante. Al inicio dibujaba el protoboard en lugar de dibujar/crear el diagrama de conexión,  comencé por aplicarlos directamente sin saber porque solo lo utilizaba para resolver el problema, hasta que en un curso de verano aprendí para que se utilizaban, pero realmente lo interesante fue aprender el porqué se a aplicaban y qué era lo que sucedía, es decir, el fenómeno que lo producía. Entre más conozco de la electrónica, me sigue apasionando e interesando de una forma espectacular. 

2.  How did you come up with the idea for speech recognition software/hardware?  What was your inspiration? Why the gloves? 

I began developing this project under the direction of Jose Carlos Tovar, an engineer who was my coach and adviser.  He had experience working on diverse projects directed to blind people, for example Darshan or PC Lazarillo.  The conventional computers do most of their interaction in a visual form, so if we want computers to be useful to blind people we most adapt their software and hardware.   

Inspiration:

My greatest motivation was not the award at all.  It was the knowledge that I acquired when I was involved in the creation process. That discovery process can also help other people and this is what has inspired me to keep going.

Why the gloves?

Blind people use their sense of touch like one of their main senses.  Blind people  know the world by their hands because they use them for most of their activities.

Como dise  con la idea de lenguaje  en software y hardware? 
Comencé en el desarrollo de proyectos gracias al ing. José Carlos Tovar, quien fue el asesor. Ahí han trabajado con diversos proyectos anteriormente también dirigidos a personas invidentes, por ejemplo Darshan PC Lazarillo.

La computadora convencional se muestran los procesos de forma visual, así que se debe aprovechar  ls demás sentidos de los invidentes,  y en ellos el oído y el tacto son primordiales para su conexión con el mundo, por esto es que debe adecuarse el software y hardware a las capacidades diferentes de las personas diferentes.

Qué ha sido tu inspiación? 
En el proceso de la creación de un proyecto, he descubierto que la mayor aspiración/inspiración, no es llegar o subir a un podium,  sino que esté es el conocimiento que adquieres cuando estás en el proceso de creación. Sabiendo qué este  pueda ayudar a las demás personas.

Porqué los guantes?
Por como comentaba hace un momento,  el invidente maneja e tacto como uno de los sentidos principales, y como el tacto es representado por las manos, y se puede decir que ellos

3.  How much time did spend working on the project?