1-877-MATH-FOR-KIDS: Beginning Addition

Practice basic addition in a multiplayer Echo Buttons game

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Inspiration

I was looking for a way for my youngest sister, who is in elementary school, to practice her addition skills, and making an Echo Buttons skill seemed like the perfect way to help her.

What it does

Players compete against each other to answer Alexa's questions first. The questions are simple arithmetic (e.g. "What is 7 plus 48?"). There are six questions per game. Once Alexa asks a question, the first player to press their button and give a correct answer will receive a point.

Users can also choose a single player option, which doesn't involve Echo Buttons.

How I built it

I started with the Button Quiz skill from Github and changed the code so that it would randomly generate questions, instead of me having to write the questions myself.

Challenges I ran into

Since users would be answering with numbers instead of words, I changed the slot intent for answers from the default answers slot to AMAZON.NUMBER. As a result, Alexa would get confused when asking for player count, since player count shares the same slot intent. To fix this, I made a single intent for all number inputs, and used sessionAttributes to keep track of what Alexa was expecting from the user.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I had very little experience using AWS before this, and building this skill helped me to find my way around the AWS console. I'm also really proud that I was able to get this skill working in a super short period of time!

What I learned

Building conversational AI is really, really difficult, and I have a lot more respect now for the Alexa engineers.

What's next for 1-877-MATH-FOR-KIDS: Beginning Addition

I'm planning on adding more features, like doing medium and advanced addition, as well as subtraction, multiplication, and division!

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