Inspiration
My mom is a kindergarten teacher; she's always looking for new ways to engage her students in conversation. She approached me with the idea that I should try to implement the "turn and talk" method, a tried-and-true method of enhancing a child's language skills, into an Alexa skill.
What it does
This skill is was created with the goal in mind of aiding teachers of young students in teaching listening skills through the use of the "turn and talk" method, which is described as follows. The teacher begins by pairing each student up. Each child then turns to their partner, and then the teacher provides each student with a question. Each student then takes a turn answering the question. This method is implemented by providing the students with a random question, a timer so each student knows when their time to talk is done, and also introduces a series of verbal cues that a teacher would introduce to her students prior to use that help to keep children on task.
Using the skill is fairly simple. To start the skill, say something to the effect of "Alexa, ask Classchat to give us a question", and Alexa will begin by saying, "Okay everyone, 1, 2, 3, knee to knee!" This is one of the aforementioned verbal cues, and is the "turn" part of "turn and talk". At this point, each child would be asked to face their partner. Alexa will then ask a random question from the question database provided. After Alexa asks the question, an internal timer will begin, and this is where a teacher would direct her students to begin to answer the question to one another. The default time is set to 3 minutes, and Alexa will announce when time is halfway finished so the other partner can begin to speak. Once time is up, Alexa will say "3, 2, 1, talking is done!", which is another verbal cue meant to return the attention to the teacher. It will then ask the kids to give a "thumbs up" if they demonstrated a key communication skill, such as making good eye contact.
You can ask Alexa to provide a question that is more focused on a specific topic by saying something like "ask Classchat to give us a question about respect". The different topics you can currently choose from are: reading, our strengths, each other, respect, and school.
You can also adjust the time allotted for the question by saying something like "ask Classchat for question for 2 minutes". A number of different phrasings have been included in the intent schema in order to provide for many different teaching scenarios.
How I built it
I wrote an AWS Lambda function using Python 2.7 as the base language. My mother was able to provide me with a list of questions and topics that she thought would be most useful for her classroom.
Challenges I ran into
I didn't know how I was going to implement a timer into the skill. My worry was that when I added the timer, the kids talking would actually interrupt the timer and cause Alexa to try and process their answers as new input. I was eventually able to find a workaround by including an appropriate number of 'break' tags into the SSML, and since the session ends right after the text finishes, Alexa won't take any more input unless someone specifically says "Alexa".
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm proud that I was able to help create something for my mom that I know she will be able to use in her classroom. I hope that other teachers will see the use in this skill and the "turn and talk" method in providing their kids with new ways to develop listening skills.
What I learned
I learned a lot about the Alexa skill development process. This is my first skill I've decided to publish, and I've made some mistakes that I'll be able to learn from the next time I decide to submit. The skill was submitted for certification on January 9th, and is currently still awaiting certification. If I had known how difficult the process was, I would have submitted much sooner.
What's next for Classchat
Right now, there is a fixed selection of questions and subjects that the skill provides you with. I would like to implement a system where the teacher can actually edit the list of questions and subject tags to fit their curriculum by editing an outside document, but that's another project for another day.
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