Project Story
Inspiration
As Alberta teachers recently went on strike, it became clear that the education system is under pressure. Many educators face growing workloads and limited support for personalized teaching. We wanted to optimize teaching resources by creating a tool that makes learning and reviewing both fun and adaptive — while allowing teachers to stay hands-free.
Students in the same classroom often have very different learning paces. With the help of neurotechnology, we built this solution to make personalized learning accessible and data-driven.
What We Learned
Before this hackathon, none of us had experience with Brain–Computer Interfaces (BCI). Through NatHack’s pre-workshop, we learned the fundamentals of biopotential signals and how to integrate them into real-time applications. During the event, we also learned to build and prototype a Unity-based game, guided by our problem provider and by sharing knowledge within our team.
We discovered that the most valuable learning comes from collaboration — picking up new techniques, debugging each other’s work, and creatively combining art, design, and coding.
How We Built It
- Story writing & game design – creating a playful narrative centered around Fifendekel the squirrel.
- Unity implementation & animation – designing the gameplay loop and interactions.
- Neurofeedback integration – connecting the NeuroPawn biopotential kit to measure students’ cognitive load while solving riddles.
- Learning record tracking – storing performance and stress data to help teachers identify students who may need additional support.
Challenges
Our biggest challenge was the learning hurdles — learning new technologies while building a functioning prototype within only 64 hours. Integrating hardware (BCI) and software (Unity) in such a short period required constant communication and adaptability.
Despite the hurdles, we are proud to have developed a working prototype that merges education, neuroscience, and game design into one playful yet impactful experience.
Accomplishments
In this hackathon, we have:
- made an educational game that’s fun to play
- contains cute creatures and silly characters
- created an engaging story with adventure and whimsy
- encourage the player to learn and improve
- learned new skills and technologies
- many of us picked up Unity for the first time
- created assets, UI elements, scenes etc. that form a functional game
- went from first interaction with an EEG headset to incorporating EEG data into Unity using the BrainFlow API
- picked up Machine Learning and utilized it in our project
- formulated an algorithm that determines the appropriate difficulty for the user
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