Name Pix!

An easy-to-customize teaching tool for childhood education based on traditional flash card games.

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Inspiration

Childhood education is becoming a major challenge:

  • The number of students per teacher is out of proportion
  • Increased use of technology in the class
  • Wanting to create something that gives complete
  • Help expose students to more cultures and cross-culture learning at a younger age
  • Costly to send enough teacher to certain locations, such as refugee camps

What it does

Bringing a classic teaching tool to computers everywhere, Name Pix! allows the user the ease of creating their own image-word flash card game. All the user has to do is simply upload the number of desired images. The web app takes care of the rest. Name Pix! uses Watson Visual Recognition to identify the main entity of the image, creates a simple multiple choice game based on the returned entity.

How we built it

Backend is built using node.js and IBM Watson Visual Recognition API. Frontend is designed using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Hosted on a server from Amazon Web Services.

Challenges we ran into

Being our first game, not to mention web app, there was a major learning curve. Design and development on major game elements, complexity of the game, and research took a great deal more time than what we initially had planned. Trying to keep the game simple and creative but true our educational perspective was the biggest challenge of design and development.

As we were finishing backend and getting frontend development underway, we ran into some trouble when our original Python code and associated web app frameworks would not run on the server. We had to write the entire program a second time, starting from scratch with a language that no one on the team has had previous experience with before (node.js), in less than 15 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Learning node.js in less than 24 hours to create a function web application.
  • Getting Watson API working with Python after being told that the docs where broken.

What we learned

  • Hackathons are intense, strenuous, fun, and rewarding places of learning
  • Developing and designing games is an evolutionary process, one that requires flexibility not only with creativity and code, but also with team members.
  • IBM Watson Visual Recognition API and implementation
  • Learned how to write node.js code

What's next for Name Pix!

  • Different gaming modes. For example, typing mode (lets the player practice typing in the word rather than selecting)
  • Expanding app capabilities to allow educators to train Watson Visual Recognition using image bundles for specific categories.
  • User login and database that can store previous game versions for easy access.
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