TheHelpingHen.com

Children with dyscalculia are often overlooked when it comes to learning in a classroom. Our team has decided to change that by making a website where you can learn and review math problems.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by multiple different applications such as Duolingo, IXL, and Khan Academy. Our website has features similar to IXL and Khan Academy in the sense that it gives practice problems of different math topics to the user. Our website is similar to Duolingo in the sense that it has audio for the symbols to let the user know what it is. It also makes learning fun which can come from both applications!

What it does

The main goal of our website, TheHelpingHen.com is to make learning math more engaging and entertaining for children who have dyscalculia or general math anxiety. We currently have four sections, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In each section, we will generate random math problems based on that category. We have also included blocks by the numbers to help with visual learning which is something that can be helpful for some students that are dealing with dyscalculia. We have tried to make sure to think different methods that teachers and parents use when trying to help learn math when you have this disorder because, as with all disabilities, no one person is the same and different methods will work for different people. Another thing our website does is when going through the lessons there's a progress bar which can help with students who aren't as motivated to learn. Finally, when you click on the symbol in the problem the it will say the type of symbol that it is out loud, for example it will say "addition" when clicking on the plus sign. Recognizing and remembering mathematical symbols is a common problem for dyscalculia students.

How we built it

We built this project using HTML, Javascript, and CSS. HTML was used for the layout of all of the website, and CSS was used to style it all. Javascript was used to build the addition page, making it possible to have a random problem generator, a progress bar, and the cubes that are a visual representation of the numbers in the problems. We used AI such as ChatGPT to help us figure out how to implement the code, as none of us had used any of these languages before.

Challenges we ran into

Coming up with an idea was a big challenge for us, it took us just under two hours to think of an idea, and with only 24 hours to code and create a project, we already felt like we were falling behind. Coding became a huge challenge as well, we had tried different coding languages and we were struggling to understand how to get the website we wanted. Another challenge was that the team was not too familiar with one another, finding a way to be a team without fully knowing our teammates ability was tricky.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As first time hackers, we are proud of the website that we were able to create and that we were able to make some of our ideas come to life. We are proud of the idea we came up with, as we believe it could be very helpful to people who are struggling with dyscalculia.

What we learned

We learned how to build a website through HTML which we had little to no experience in. We learned on the spot collaboration being a new team. We also learned how to budget our time, even though we didn't do it the best this time, we gained the experience and knowledge to do better next time!

What's next for HelpingHen.com

We would like to expand our reach to also create an ELA curriculum for our dyslexic users because dyscalculia and dyslexia often go hand in hand. The plan is to also expand our page to more math topics and include more visual examples of things (i.e. learning less than/greater than with alligator symbols). We would also like to include more audio for sentences, introductions, etc. This would greatly help those who are more auditory learners or have trouble reading. We'd also like to include the use of the reward system for those who might struggle with motivation to learn. We'd incorporate more lessons rather than endless problems with confetti and earning points at the end. Finally, we'd like to make our Helping Hen be a little more interactive with the user. She could introduce the topics and even give hints if needed.

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