Inspiration
This project was inspired by me noticing how so many kids use some time of screen almost everyday. It can be for school, or to chill at home but the screen time slowly starts to add up. Even for me and other grown adults, we don't see it built up until its too late. Since the younger generation is going to be living with technology in front of them all the time, I believe it is best to create good habits from an younger age. So this extension is to teach them the most common things that could go wrong, but also teach them valuable skills and stimulate their brain activity.
What it does
This project is a simple extension that can be added to any web page. It does one of three things:
- Looks at the emails a kid is clicking into to ensure it is safe, if not it block the kid from clicking into it and make the pet sad.
- It looks at the strengths of password created, if it good then the pet gets more happy. If the password is weak then the pet will become sad.
- It looks at how long the user was inactive in that page(I used inactivity for the demo, we can change it to time limits or other restriction in the future), if they were then the pet gets tired and tells the user to take a break.
To ensure the kids don't lose their motivation to be safe online, they have a way of making the pet happy again. This can be done with the "Give Treat" button, so when user clicks on it a random (math, vocab, logic) question shows up on the left hand bottom side. The kids have to answer two question right to see the pet's happiness bar rise.
Finally we have a recommended off-time based on how much time we spend on it. It was supposed to be machine learning but I am not very sure it works, because I don't know how to test it. But for the demo if we do ctrl+shift+d then we can change the data for the last 7 days and see the break time either increase or decrease based on the inputs.
How we built it
I used JavaScript, CSS, HTML and JSON. I used JS & CSS for the extension itself and the created a fake page for my demo's. So the html part has a fake link, password checker, and the last test inactivity listed in order. The JSON file allows me to implement the extension into the demo page I created.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge I ran into is that my extension wouldn't show on my demo html page for a really long time, but after a while I realized the mistake was simply in how one of the file was outside of the folder. The next biggest one I ran into was implementing the machine learning part for my extension, but in the end I think it ended up being a complex algorithm rather than AI-driven.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Accomplishments that I am proud of include being able to make the extension work like how it is supposed too. Also making the fake data for the demo be changeable with few keystrokes.
What we learned
I learned a lot about JSON, I have never used it. So it was fun working with something I hadn't worked with. The other thing I learned was more conceptual-- it was that machine learning is pretty much long algorithms that is used for a computer to learn and predict from.
What's next for CyberPet
The next steps for CyberPet would be making it truly an AI-driven break generator, but also make the step 3 a bit more flexible. That is change inactivity to limited screen time, or scroll motion, or etc.
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