Catalyst

Home page
Games
Memory match
Unscramble
Inspiration
Inventions by women
Chat room
Random quote generator
Sophia, the chatbot
Chatbot (minimised)

URL to the demo:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WN0Xe7i5CENuOh5LKT09m7hroOU8OGki/view?usp=sharing

Inspiration

I like making games which are fun and talk about certain issues. So, I made this app to educate people about the gender imbalance in the society. Women’s under-representation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a prominent concern in our society and many others. This app aims to talk about the amazing inventions by women (thereby telling that though we might be a minority, we have the potential to make awesome stuff!).

What it does

Catalyst is an educational app which tells about women empowerment and why we need gender equality. It has interactive games to gamify the learning experience. It gives information about inventions by women which led to major breakthroughs in various fields. It generates motivational quotes and stories randomly, to inspire and push you further.

The app also has a chat room where you can meet people and have interesting discussions. In case you need someone to talk to, it also has a chatbot- Sophia (named after the humanoid robot)- which tells about women empowerment, feminism and also engages in small talk!

How I built it

I have used JavaScript for making the games, Pubnub API for the chat room and DialogFlow for the chatbot. The UI is done using HTML, CSS and Bootstrap.

Challenges I ran into

When I first trained the Google DialogFlow, I didn't realise that I was adding all my questions and responses to the same intent. So I had to start over and then create a new intent for each topic that the bot had to respond to. I have also tried to include a mailing system, to send alerts but wasn't successful and had to switch it to chat room.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm kinda surprised I could finish all of this before the deadline. The games were really fun to code and I love how interactive and easy to navigate the whole application is. The chat room idea was last minute but I managed to finish it in time. So yay! :D

What I learned

I've learnt how to make a chat room using the Pubnub API. I've also made some cool games and learnt a lot during the process. This is my first time training a chatbot and I've gained quite some interest in natural language processing :) I hope to learn more about NLP and implement it's applications in my future projects.

What's next for Catalyst

I hope to migrate this to a MERN stack (and deploy it), to improve the functionality of the application and to support other features like Phaser or Pygame which are much more flexible.