Class on Demand

Inspiration

My sister-in-law has two kids at home that are using distance learning. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted education worldwide and this affects my nephews as well. Their class sessions are mostly passive endeavors and watching a screen for prolonged periods of time does not fit their learning style.

We wanted to develop a platform that addresses their active learning style and is accessible to many educational systems. Leveraging the amazon echo device to provide that functionality presents a compelling option.

Class on Demand aims to provide an engaging platform for distance learning that promotes interaction with students and allows the parents and caretakers to be involved with their learning. The parents can also listen to their kids during these lessons, which allows for monitoring their progress. This is an advantage over traditional written homework since parents can tune-in to the lesson.

What it does

Class on Demand is a distance learning platform that promotes student engagement through the use of alexa skills by providing greater interaction through voice. Alexa prompts the user for a category whether that be math, spelling, colors, english, etc. The user will respond with the game of their choice for example, math, and Alexa will begin asking pseudo-randomly generated math questions until the game is over. On game over, alexa will congratulate the user giving off the total score and that is the lifecycle of the skill.

How we built it

Using Amazons Alexa skills kit SDK we were able to create default alexa skill with all bells and whistles including the launch invocation name, and interaction model. We used python as that was a familiar language to the most of us and created/mapped out all of our alexa intents ranging from the default(Yes/No/Help/Cancel), to the custom(Math/Number). The math intent is where we pseudo-randomly generated numbers with python's random module and limited the maximum amount of questions to 3 for demo purposes. AWS Dynamodb/s3 are the built in storage options for data persistence and AWS cloudwatch was our main source for debugging/logging. We were able to test our code via the built in Alexa Simulator included with the ASK environment.

Challenges we ran into

Working across time zones with different team members Designing a voice user interface without prior ux design experience

Feasibility issues and time constraints for example: Alexa only listens for keywords rather than recording user speech or at least does not provide us with the full phrase. This makes it difficult to implement a spelling game without asking the user for single letter and checking if it's correct before moving onto the next letter. Ideally we would like to enable the user to spell out the entire word for a seamless experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Created a low-cost interactive platform that encourages student engagement with learning.

What we learned

Building several features we had in mind for our idea like a companion app/leaderboards/surveys takes a lot of time. Alexa is everywhere and the built in platform is easy to pick up but difficult to master. States can get very complex if the voice user interaction design is not good. Debugging through AWS Cloudwatch.

What's next for Class on Demand

We want to incorporate more features including classroom surveys and leaderboard to gauge student understanding and classroom progress. We would also like to create more categories and games for education such as spelling, english, science, etc as well as support multimodal devices or devices with screens.