Alphabet Chu Chu Train

Inspiration

Learning the alphabet is one milestone that we tend to mark as an indication of a child's successful entry into the world of reading. A child who can name all the letters in the alphabet by the end of kindergarten will be equipped with an important foundational stepping stone toward recognizing sounds and printed words. Early childhood education can be an invaluable opportunity for learning social and emotional skills.
When I heard about Alexa couple of years back, I started watching closely and at sometime I thought this would be game changer, especially for kids, and here you go.... I was right!

Enabling.. Chu Chu Train skill..

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Alphabet Chu Chu Train is fun and engaging skill for kids that will take chu chu train to different stations and teach alphabet letters along with alphabet song.
Trains are very close to kids, and they love to travel in train and have fun. Keeping that in mind, the skill provides that experience of travelling in train throughout the skill. It provides awesome sound effects for each word and reads the spelling for the word as well.
The skill remembers the last state and continues from that letter, when you invoke next time. The skill was purposefully kept simple without complex flows so that even kids can enable and use them under the guidance of parents.
Enjoy the fun ride!

What is unique about this skill?

A lot of thought process and brain storming was done, to make this skill unique from other similar skills. What is unique about this skill?

Educate, Engage and Entertain -Targeted 3 to 5 years kids.
Very Simple with very less interaction. Kids have very less attention span and don't like to interact much.
Skill responds slowly (slow speech rate), to make it easy for kids to understand and enjoy.
Remembers the last session letter and starts from that position in the next session.
Awesome sound effects.
Rewards for kids as they use more.

How I built it

The skill was developed using aws alexa skill sdk, and S3 storage (for storing audio files).

Challenges I ran into

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I have developed many alexa skills and published to alexa store. However, developing a skill targeting kids are definitely challenging. It requires lots of focus, analysis, content validation and sometime we need become kids ourselves to understand from their point of view. It is almost like catching a running train!.
Many thanks to Amazon and Devpost for providing crash course and guidance for developing skill for kids. This made my life a lot easier.
As part of the skill development, I had collect lots of audio and data to make the skill more random and engaging.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Developing skills for kids are not easier and am definitely proud now and will be even prouder when the skill is used by kids around the world and benefited. Also, definitely, a proud dad as well!