Etymology.AI

Our Inspiration - AlgeGirl and Decimal Dog

Inspiration

Since the day my daughter was born, I've made a ton of hacks to help her learn things quickly while having fun. But by the time she finished kindergarten, her math according to a standardized score (MapGrowth) was "typical of 10th grade winter."

As creative as I am, the amount of math, and English Language Arts, spanning 4th grade to 12th was too much to consistently come up with really personalized learning acceleration hooks (mnemonics or physical activities)

What it does

Etymology.AI inspires A parent, teacher or even someone trying to teach themselves something quickly just enters one keyword a lesson depends on.

An inspiring, and often entertaining mnemonic and short store is generated. If it inspires a sticky lesson in the next hour, day or week, the lesson and the kernel that helped inspire it can be tracked against cognitive milestones.

Using Coda AI video summaries of outcomes can be compared and matched against common core standards, Lexile Norms, MapGrowth RIT Scores and other benchmarks for school age students.

How we built it

I experimented with a fair amount table and timeline functions, as well as numerous Coda packs to see what was possible. After getting a feel for the database features of the tables, I built my first simple pack using the Coda SDK. After that, I created a small web app to that could be embedded in case the pack wasn't approved (or otherwise wasn't functioning as desired in time for the challenge).

Finally, I tested the flow against real learning milestones of my daughter and the related learning tools/hacks I experimented with.

Challenges we ran into

Honestly just time :) That's one of the benefits of hackathons (IMO).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

My favorite thing is to try these weekend builds against a diverse audience of critical friends and associates. This is one of the very few cases where everyone I introduced the tool to came back and used it multiple times just for the fun of it. It's simple, but fun and useful. Thinking about their reactions makes me genuinely smile which, historically means something of value was created.