Aini the Educational AI

Aini in Action

Inspiration

I'm Pedro and my nephew spent too much time playing online games, my Sister in law was concerned about it, I helped her set up digital wellbeing tools so She could manage his time on the phone, She also wanted him to spend more time reading, so the challenge was, how to get him motivated to do so?

I gave her the idea to ask him to read for one hour to get one extra hour of online games, and She gave it a try. He was very motivated and gave her a call the first time, but She was not available, She was at the office, so he needed to wait until She had time to talk about the book, so Aini seemed like a great idea to solve this problem.

I'm Ingo and my son is already using a couple of websites to supplement his learning (reading, math, etc) but they are not connected to any reward system to make it more fun and for them to be truly motivated to accomplish the next set of quizzes.

I see at school that many parents and kids have challenges getting into so many different platforms, it also becomes challenging to keep track of all of them, using something as simple as Facebook Messenger, lowers that barrier, and simplifies the whole process aside of making it extremely easy to use it from any phone, something that these platforms are not good at.

What it does

Aini is an Educational ChatBot that has a database of books and quizzes for kids to see their progress while earning rewards.

How we built it

For this proof of concept, we used "Quick Replies" and we built it using:

NodeJS
Next.js
AuroraDB
Heroku

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was to find a simple, straight forward and free platform to prototype this app, we started with glitch.com but it had multiple outages during this time, then we moved to Vercel.com but they did not provide data storage so we finally ended up using Heroku.

Time was also a big challenge for us, coordinating considering our daily lives and jobs did not allow us to do even more progress.

One challenge on Facebook Developers is that it was not clear to us that every time that we changed the webhook we needed to get a new Access Token and that only the creator of the app could have access to create a new one.

Due to the size of our team, we were not able to make significant progress on the admin side and to make everything look better, next time we would like to get a Product Designer on our team.

Because this was our first time developing a chatbot and that we are used to working developing either APIs or for the Web it became a challenge to define and design the interactions with Aini.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finishing the proof of concept and having Ingo's son tested it successfully. Knowing that it worked despite how simple it is it shows its great potential.

What we learned

Aside from using Heroku, Next.js, and how easy it is to integrate with the Facebook Messenger API, we learned that we can still code and hack together like the old times.

What's next for Aini

We would love to be able to try this bot with Messenger Kids and:

Finish the admin and give access to Parents/Teachers
Add more books and quizzes
Allow Parents/Teachers to log in with Facebook so they can get Aini to tell them when their kids answered questions
Find a way to allow multiple rewards and for Aini to keep track of them
To expand it to more than just books
To see how we could use AI to make the conversations feel more natural