Inspiration to create fact or fake news
We love curious and random facts and we recognized that the kids in our families also love them. Some even read lexica to find as much things as possible that adults don’t know, to amaze them. We considered the American presidents an interesting and relevant topic and wondered, if the kids (and also we ourselves) can differentiate between true and wrong statements about the presidents. That’s how fact or fake news was born.
What fact or fake news does
fact or fake news is a quiz. You can play it alone or with up to four players in several rounds. If you play alone or with two players, you’ll get seven statements each. If three or four players play the quiz, everyone has to face five statements. The players respond to the statements either with ‘fact’ or ‘fake news’. For every correct answer a player gets one point. In the end every player gets to know how many points he made and who won the game.
Moreover, fact or fake news provides additional information about the statements: Having reacted with ‘fact’ or ‘fake news’ to the given statement, usually background information or the explanation what’s right and why the statement is considered ‘fake news’ is provided.
How we built fact or fake news
Anne planned the skill and wrote a basic version in Java. Matthias adapted that version for the skill’s backend with the Java Alexa Skills Kit SDK.
Challenges we ran into
Alexa’s ability to understand Germans speaking English caused some problems. Therefore we recommend our users just to answer with ‘fact’ or ‘fake news’ even though our interaction model contains alternative responses such as ‘right’, ‘wrong’, etc.
Being live Alexa ended the skill prematurely. We store the statements, the boolean (fact or fake news) and the additional information in an array. When we didn’t have too many statements our random picker searched for a random statement in an endless loop not being allowed to take empty entries out of the array. This endless loop caused sometimes a skill response time out. After recognizing the problem we were able to fix it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
It is the first game we programmed. We are particularly proud of our name memory, statement picker (no double statements), active player pass-through and the point counter which all work without a database.
What's next for fact or fake news
We want to include constantly more statements and the correspondent additional information.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.