Inspiration
Learning is very important for child's future, while kids attend school not all of them are learning to their full capacity with a growth oriented mindset. This Amazon Alexa skill sets out to forge a path of better education within the home.
What it does
In its first incarnation the skill allows kids to enhance their arithmetic skills, namely addition. Each learning experience is centered around an adventure that takes place in different locations. Along this adventure we come across different animals and the child's task is to determine how many animals of each type we encounter, through addition. This is designed to keep the child engaged with their imagination while at the same time stimulate their desire to learn and grow their skills. The advantage of using a voice platform, like Amazon Alexa, is that we can now provide context specific help. If a child mentions something about it being too hard or too easy, we can modify the difficulty in the moment. Likewise, if the child is stuck and mention that they do not know the answer we can quickly interject and give them help to aid them to find the answer. Since kids don't have as much experience talking to computers, as adults do on automated telephone systems, the voice design was engineered to be less robotic and more natural, making every path a happy path.
How I built it
The skill was developed using NodeJS through the Alexa Skills Kit SDK for Node.js.
Challenges I ran into
With voice, the challenge is always going to be handling the vast amount of ways that anyone can say the same thing, this leads to difficulties in creating sample utterances to feed the interaction model.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I believe the handling of the non-standard responses that kids can say to the skill will shine through.
What I learned
Adults have been trained to talk to computers through automated systems either on the phone or structured forms on websites and apps. Kids start using voice interfaces thinking it is like one of them, through this I learned to be able to handle unexpected responses is the key to a satisfying user experience.
What's next for Number Adventures
I believe that making learning fun, varied and engaging is important, as a result of this I will explore other potential ways to make the kids of the future better prepared for life long learning.
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