Inspiration
My mother works with children with learning disabilities, and one day she mentioned that the math tool they were using to practice basic arithmetic wasn't adaptive enough to the children's demands. So, I decided to make an educational game that adapts to the student's relative skill
What it does
The website uses Elo-style rankings to generate problems at the student's ability level. As the student progresses, his or her ranking changes over time and the program either provides harder or easier problems to accommodate the student's learning curve. Occasionally, the math problems will be broken up by short but fun riddles or word games to provide a small break for the kids who might be frustrated with their lack of progress.
How we built it
The back end is Javascript interfacing with Google's Firebase API, which provides both authentication and database storage for each user's rating and level. On top of that is a simple HTML and CSS front end.
Challenges we ran into
Creating the infrastructure for the database and authentication was slow but eventually we were able to get our app up and running in a timely fashion. The UI was also a challenge, as the head programmer has absolutely no sense of graphic design; however, the lead designer came through and made everything much more pretty in the final version.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our implementation of the Elo rating is something that we're pretty proud of, as we believe that it is very well suited for adapting to the student's individual skill level. We believe that the rating system can be improved, and that it is a great way to help kids learn at their own speed.
What we learned
We learned that designing a good UI is much harder than it seems, but a clean look goes a long way towards making your product more viable.
What's next for Hidden Temple
We hope to add more levels, and also adding an endless mode. Basically, we want to flesh out the idea more, as we see the potential in educational games such as this to be used in schools across the nation.
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