Monkey Math - A Fun Math Practice

Inspiration

1 + 2 = 3

3 * 3 = 9

4 - 1 = 3

5 / 5 = 1

Is this math enough for kids?

Most kids who are good at memorizing math facts, may not understand the phrases and concepts used in math. Sure, we need the inventive geniuses who make our society better. But innovation is just part of the equation. Kids need to learn math to make their own adult lives better, by making smart decisions on routine day-to-day matters. Early childhood education can be an invaluable opportunity for learning social and emotional skills. If we see today, most of the technology innovations are related to math (A.I, Machine Learning, Quantum Computing etc.,).
When I heard about Alexa couple of years back, I started watching closely and at sometime I thought this would be game changer, especially for kids, and here you go.... I was right!

$Alt text$

What it does

Monkey Math - A fun Math practice for kids. This unique skill provides real world math word problems in interesting and fun way, and enable kids to understand and apply their math knowledge in the real life. Word problems involve a lot more than just solving calculations. Word problems can also be challenging for kids who have difficulty staying focused or controlling impulses. The skill has different categories and levels of difficulty (easy, medium or hard) for children of different ages. The skill introduces a monkey character Boo boo to make it engaging for the children and also rewards them as they answer correctly.
There are also, different medals kids get as they explore and collect more bananas as rewards. There are categories available are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, times table, greater or lesser, place value and shapes.
So, what is unique about this skill?

Real life math world problem.
Boo boo monkey character and monkey sounds to engage kids.
Different difficulty level for kids of different ages.
The speech and questions are asked at slower speed.
The skill provides enough time for the kids to think and answer before each question.
Rewards and Medals to keep them coming back.
Remembers last session and on the next login, starts the session from there.

What else your kids need then? Nothing, Just enable the skill!.

How I built it

The skill was developed using aws alexa skill sdk,S3 storage (for storing audio files) and dynamoDB.

Challenges I ran into

I have developed many alexa skills and published to alexa store. However, developing a skill targeting kids are definitely challenging. It requires lots of focus, analysis, content validation and sometime we need become kids ourselves to understand from their point of view.
Lesser the age of kids, more challenging it is. Many thanks to Amazon and Devpost for providing crash course and guidance for developing skill for kids. This made my life a lot easier.
Also, when I started the skill and thought for persistence, I was worried, but alexa skill SDK and DynamoDB NoSQL made it extremely simple with just one line of code!. Amazing!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Developing skills for kids are not easier and am definitely proud now and will be even prouder when the skill is used by kids around the world and benefited. Also, definitely, a proud dad as well! Alt text