Inspiration
I wanted to make a game that was fun, educational and easy to learn for children. I was inspired by my mother who works one-on-one with students at an elementary school. She is constantly struggling to keep her students immersed with subjects, such as mathematics, because many of the methods used for studying or teaching are unable to pique the interest of the children or are too difficult for the children to understand. A constant worry for her is making sure the students' learning is both fun and effective because if something is generally not fun for someone, especially children, they probably will no interest in it or have no desire to study it. I think a game such as this is a possible remedy because while its content provides both entertainment and education, the medium (an Amazon Alexa enabled device) actually interacts and talks to the user. My hope is that this will allow children to feel more engaged and interested in mathematics by having fun and by being a new and different type of learning experience.
What it does
The Living Calculator is a family-friendly educational math game where the player solves a series of increasingly larger math equations until you answer incorrectly. This game helps the player have fun while learning simple arithmetic or it can be used to sharpen and challenge math skills, memory skills, and even mental reflexes. It is great for children because the answers are always non-negative, the equations are fairly simple and the game has three levels of difficulties. The "Easy" difficulty is addition only with numbers between 0 and 10, "Medium" difficulty is addition and subtraction with numbers between 0 and 10, and the "Hard" difficulty is addition and subtraction, but with numbers between 0 and 20. There are also built-in functions to handle help requests, such as directions or rules.
How it Works
Here's how a typical game works:
- When you begin a new game, you select a difficulty (easy, medium, or hard)
- You are then told an equation and asked to give a solution.
- If you answer an equation incorrectly, the game ends, but you always have the choice to play again.
- If you answer an equation correctly, you have the choice to continue, but the equation in the next round will always have one extra variable added to it, making the game more difficult.
How I built it
I started by laying out a diagram for the flow of my program. I followed up by creating user stories and tried my best to follow an agile development methodology for good practice. I built the Living Calculator Game using Microsoft Visual Studio to write a Javascipt file to run the program and create a JSON file containing the interaction model (intents, etc.). I then used the Amazon Web Service tool, Lambda, to host my program and used the Amazon Developer Console to upload my interaction model and create the skill.
Challenges I ran into
One challenge I ran into was creating menus that were short and concise, yet informative because I felt that if there were too many instructions or too long of explanations that it would be hard to keep interest in the game. Another challenge is of course trying to cover all the possibilities when it comes to prediction and inferring the type of commands a user will give when they desire a certain action.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I felt as if I was successful with the interface for the game because my primary goal was to make it simple to understand and easy to play. I was able to do this by having a help menu and instructions that were fairly concise and easy to access. I wanted it to be a game that you could play for any duration, so that you can play it for a very long time or just drop in for a few rounds. I also felt as if utilizing "speechcons" (a variety of "good job" or "ugh" type phrases) after the player answers questions made the game more lively because it changes every round and adds more of a personal touch to the application. I felt using an agile methodology was also a success because it helped me determine content users would like as I went through the process.
What I learned
This was quite a learning experience for me. I learned that applications that leverage voice services heavily rely on the principle of being user-friendly, in the sense that they must be simple to use, but can be self-explanatory. Unlike mobile applications, there generally is not a simple way to display directions with a voice application, so its up to the developer to infer, and in a way, predict what people might say if they want a certain action from the applications. In primarily designing this Alexa Skill for children and for learning, I made an attempt to simplify the game as much as I can so that it is easy to understand and play because a game is usually no fun if it is too difficult to play.
What's next for The Living Calculator
I plan to eventually post a tutorial on how this game was made and how each piece of code functions, in the hope that it may help other people create applications to help entertain and educate children.
I also plan on looking into every piece of feedback so that I can improve my game.
Beyond this particular program, I also want to design other games and applications primarily for children that can be a effective learning experience and fun to play.
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