Inspiration
How can we guide our kids to eat healthier? Can we teach them about the different fruits and vegetables, their healthy properties and other interesting facts about them? Why not even we learn something new?
What it does
This skill challenges its users to guess and learn 90+ fruits and vegetables, along it presents interesting facts about them. It does so, in a game-like exercise so that the learning process will be a bit easier and lot more fun! The game is divided in several (9 at this point) levels, each with 10 different fruits and vegetables. It gives hints about every one of them, starting from general properties like type, color and size, passing through some facts about them and at the end giving hints about the letters they start and end with.
The name
The name "Avocado Challenge" was inspired by the superfood fruit. The fruit is also sometimes mistaken for a vegetable, so in a sense it combines them. I wanted its name to be shorter than "Fruits and vegetables challenge" and more remarkable.
How I built it
It is built with Node.js using the Alexa Skills Kit SDK, running on Amazon Lambda and using DynamoDB for storage.
Challenges I ran into
Content is King! In this particullar skill the most hard part was to gather a reasonable ammount of fruits and vegetables and interesting facts about them. The initial target was to have 100, but for the first pass I settled with 90 including ones that we eat every day, to others that we rarely buy from the store and rare ones.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
That I built the skill like a game, with different levels from easy to hard, having the kids learn new things while being entertained. Another thing that I am proud of is how the game tries to teach kids the fruits and vegetables and even those that they don't know. So here comes the question, how can we challenge the kids to guess something that they have never heard of? I created an approach of giving hints iteratively if the child gets stuck on a particular word. If after all hints the child still cannot name the fruit, we would suggest to skip the word, by telling it and then going again through it at the end of the level. This way we can make sure that kids can learn new words by repeating them at the end, before proceeding to next level.
What I learned
I myself have learned quite a few new fruits and vegetables, and most importantly their healthy benefits. So now when I go to the store I tend to pick for home some fruits and vegetables that I have ignored before, because I didn't know how healthy they are. So as it turns out with me, the skill may also be helpful to grown ups :-)
What's next for Avocado Challenge
To have more content, from new fruits and vegetables to more facts about the existing ones.
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