Math Flash Alexa Skill

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  Math Flash Alexa Skill

Inspiration

My wife is a fifth grade math teacher. She loves what she does and puts her heart into her work. I created this skill so that her students can have another tool to test their math skills.

What it does

With Math Flash you can test your math skills with a quiz in the areas of Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division. You can also set the difficulty of the quiz. When a quiz is complete it will give you your score. You can also hear a breakdown of all your past scores. Math Flash supports multiple users so you and your friends can play. A quiz has 10 questions. You are allowed 3 guesses per question. You can repeat a question or move to the next question. You can pause and resume a quiz. Only one quiz can be paused at a time. You are only scored on the quizzes you complete.

How I built it

Alexa Skills Kit SDK for Node.js. The skill is hosted in AWS Lambda and uses AWS DynamoDB for session storage.

Challenges I ran into

Understanding Alexa state handling with the SDK. I had initially created another Alexa skill using the Java SDK which I actually hosted as a web service locally. So I had to switch my thinking a bit with the node.js SDK. Also, locally testing the lambda handler. Which actually proved easy once I discovered a tool on NPM called lambda-local.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Being part of a number of start-ups and having the opportunity to build something from nothing.

What I learned

AWS Lambda, AWS CLI, Alexa CLI, unit testing Lambda locally.

What's next for Math Flash Alexa Skill

Fix whatever bugs users discover :) Add additional difficulty levels. Provide competition based play.

Built With

• amazon-alexa
• node.js