DinoKnows

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Inspiration

Bringing you the giants who ruled the earth 66 million years ago, get ready to delve into the fascinating world of dinosaurs with DinoKnows. We were inspired to create this immersive learning experience for kids with an interest in dinosaurs to spark their curiosity and imagination while aiding in essential cognitive development. A study found that sustained intense interests in a conceptual domain, like dinosaurs, can help children develop increased knowledge and persistence, a better attention span, and deeper information-processing skills. With our team's many years of experience working with kids, we know how important it is to nurture kids' interests in healthy child development, so we created DinoKnows to help children get to know all about dinosaurs.

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What it does

DinoKnows is an interactive learning web app that offers kids an exciting experience to view a wide range of their favourite dinosaurs in an AR-like environment and get to learn important facts about each dino while examining their importance and significance in shaping the earth and advancing evolution theories. The Learn page on the website offers a selection of dinosaurs with their names and a text to speech options for kids to choose from, and once one of them is selected, you are taken to the learning page to help you learn all about that dino. The learning page offers an animated visual of the dinosaur to see what it would've looked like in real life, with an interactive option to full screen the animations and rotate the view to see different sides of the dinosaur. Beside each dino, there is a banner with its name, a speech-to-text option to hear it, and an enunciation breakdown of the name to help kids say the dino's name correctly. There is also important information about the dino such as its size, weight, diet, and nickname to help kids get a sense of its most important features. The page also includes interesting pictures like skeletons and horns, a section for the top interesting facts about the dinosaur, and a size chart to help you get an idea of the size of the dinosaur in comparison to other dinosaurs and humans.

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How we built it

We started this project by researching the most popular dinosaurs to capture what kids are most interested in and organized the most important info and interesting facts about each dino. We built this web app by first incorporating google's AR into our animated visuals of the dinosaurs. To capture the AR feel in the visuals, we added buttons for the user to rotate the view of the dinosaur. This was done with JavaScript, where it was also used for things like the speech-to-text feature and the animation of the website. We were able to organize the website in a neat and ordinarily way with the help of the cards feature in bootstrap for use as content containers, and used Html and CSS for developing our website.

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Challenges we ran into

We first had trouble capturing an immersive feel into our website with just static images of the dinosaurs which we originally had. We overcame that by incorporating google's AR of the dinosaurs into our website to make the educational experience more exciting and imaginative. We also had limited knowledge of the world of dinosaurs so we made sure we did our research before presenting the dinos in the most accurate and engaging way possible.

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Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of producing a functioning website that will help kids learn more about a topic of a strong interest in a fun and interactive way. We also are very satisfied with the simple and classy UI in the website as well as the design and feel of the overall website, where we gave careful consideration of how we can make it eye-catching for kids through an artistic touch and an aesthetic colour palette. The user controls allow for smooth coordination through the website and ease of access, which we also paid attention to especially with kids as our target audience.

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What we learned

We learned how to pronounce Stegosaurus, for starters, but we also learned how important it is that kids are given opportunities to express and pursue their intense interest for beneficial cognitive development, and how topics that can seem not as significant to others, like dinosaurs, actually play a significant role in that. We also learned how to create an educational tool in an engaging and presentable way according to our specific target audience, which in this case are kids.

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What's next for DinoKnows

We want to build further on DinoKnows by allowing for a community feature in the website where children get to connect with others and share what they learned, as well as find out about dinosaur-related events and programs happening around them as well as around the world. We also would've liked to include more hands-on learning, such as quizzes where kids would label diagrams of different dinosaurs and worksheets they can print about them.