Math Buttons Trivia

Inspiration

I love math and I wanted to develop a skill that one can have fun with, play with friends, but at the same time helps develop one's math skills.

What it does

The skill asks math questions, and provides a list of four possible answers to the players.

The skill only works with echo buttons. The player who presses the echo button first gets to answer that question. Players gain points for correct answers, and lose points for incorrect answers. In addition there are goodies like bonus points if a player gets a number of answers in a row correctly.

The skill automatically calibrates the difficulty of the questions to the players skill level. It does this by increasing the the difficulty of the questions if players answer a lot of questions correctly. A really difficult question could for example involve the division of two five digit numbers.

A player can ask for hints if he/she doesn't know the answer to a question. Players can also ask the skill to repeat the question.

The skill also displays the question on the echo show/spot. This becomes particularly useful when the questions become really difficult and players might find it hard to remember the question and all possible answers.

It also saves the state of game. So if you want to pick up the game from where you left off, you can do it.

The kinds of math operations currently supported are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, modulo. The operation and the operands are chosen randomly by the skill. The skill doesn't choose questions from a fixed set of questions but a new question is generated every time players play the game, so the skill never runs out of questions no matter how long players play the game.

This skill has been published in the UK store as well.

How I built it

I used Node-js to code the skill.

The state of the game is constantly saved in dynamo-db so that one can pick up the game from where one left it of.

Challenges I ran into

The major challenge was to make a math skill interesting. So I first decided to use echo buttons since this instills a sense of competition, and also camaraderie. Also I did not want the players to get bored either because the questions were too easy or difficult. So I automatically calibrated the difficulty of the questions to the players skill level.

Interacting with and animating echo buttons took a long time to get it to work smoothly.

The skill saves the state of the game on Dynamo DB, so that players can restart a game from where they stopped previously. Getting the skill to interact seamlessly with Dynamo was challenging.

I wanted to display a timer on echo show but could not make this work.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm happy that I could build a skill that was fun to play while being educational at the same time.

What I learned

I did not know much about skill development before this, but I have a solid understanding now.

What's next for Math Buttons Trivia

I want to enhance this skill by making better use of echo show. If someone gets an answer wrong, I want to graphically show the user the best way to solve the problem. This will give a feeling of learning in a classroom.

I want to create a timer that counts down the amount of time remaining to answer a question and display this timer on echo show.

I wanted to add questions about solving algebraic equations with echo show but I could not get this to work properly.