Big Bang Physics Quiz

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  Learning physics is fun

Inspiration

We are a team composed of a programmer and a physicist. We both love the TV series "Big Bang Theory". We both believe that learning physics can be fun for students.

What it does

Our project is a physics quiz hosted by the brilliant theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology Dr. Sheldon Cooper. Dr. Cooper asks 5 multiple choice questions. If the user responds correctly, Dr. Cooper gives some trivia about a Nobel prize winner. But if the response is wrong then the user will face Dr. Cooper’s sarcasm (and his adversion to geologists, MIT, and the cheesecake factory). At the end, Dr. Cooper makes an overall assesment of the user performance.

How we built it

We used the chat widget of PartyRock. There, we described the personality of Dr. Cooper and we provided instructions about how the quiz should be executed. We described how Dr. Cooper should react in case of a correct answer. We additionally described the types of jokes he should make in case of wrong response.

Challenges we ran into

Probably the hardest part was instructing the chat widget to have different reactions based on whether the user responds correctly or not. The widget kept “mixing” outputs and reactions. Furthermore, at some point the widget “realized” that it is part of the “Bing Bang Theory” TV series and it started using character names and facts from that series. We tried to stop that, as we understand that this may raise some copyright issues. Finally, the widget started making some insulting comments if the user was making mistakes repeatedly. We also tried to change this behaviour.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think that the quiz is fun. We really found ourselves laughing while testing the quiz functionality. We manage to make our persona polite maitaining at the same time the sarcacism of the original character.

What we learned

AI is powerful but also hard to control within boundaries. The chatbot can provide many contextualized information and enrich the chatting experience. On the other hand, this makes it hard to “program” precise tasks. It was impressive how the behavior of the chatbot changes by adding only a few words (e.g., "be polite"). Overall, using AI technology, teaching can be easily enriched with fun to use applications.

What's next for Big Bang Physics Quiz

We plan to extend our application and add support for multiple users and multiple difficulty levels. We want also to improve the learning experience, e.g., by repeating incorrecly answered questions, or by narrowing questions to a specific physics domain selected by the user. We would love to bring this experiment into a real environment and have students test it. Then, depending on the audience (e.g., age, level) the type of questions can be further contextualized.

Built With

• partyrock