STEMKids

Inspiration

New research has shown that toys and childhood interests play an essential role in career development. We believe that the key to encouraging more women to gain an interest in STEM is to influence the next generation starting from a young age.

Our childhood toys play an immense impact not just as children but also impact us well into our adulthood. We should be encouraging children to become comfortable with STEM from the beginning and instill in them the traits and skills to be successful in this field.

Due to societal and cultural norms, children tend to take an interest in toys based on the gender binary. When walking down a toy aisle it becomes clear which toys are “meant” for girls and which are “meant” for boys. The girl sections are filled with Barbie dolls and princesses. Whereas the boy's section has cars, Legos, and superheroes. The toys marketed for girls are also those traditionally rooted in female roles whereas, the ones for boys are for male-dominated industries. With our app STEMKids, we are transforming learning for young girls by using their interests to contribute to early exposure in STEM, a traditionally male-dominated industry.

Our purpose with STEMKids is to give children an equal opportunity to take an interest in STEM.

What it does

Our app gives children the equal opportunity to learn about STEM related subjects through interactive and simple yet effective games. We have built a curriculum encompassing topics that young children would typically not have exposure to. These include games related to physics, chemistry, software, and many more!

On our platform, parents are able to manage profiles for multiple children in their accounts and track the progress for each. Children can customize their avatars and choose which subject and corresponding game they are interested in.

How we built it

We have used Figma for the app design and prototype demonstration. We have tested and implemented different aspects of our app including, a menu section for choosing your avatar and interested subjects, and the “Gates Game”. We have also thought about the possible edge cases, such as children clicking on random places on the screen and have included a parental lock to combat this issue.

In terms of design, we kept in mind our audience to ensure our app was appealing to children. With the use of large fonts, colourful images, and an overall simple design we hope to enhance the user experience.

We used React Native and Expo-Cli to build the application. We integrated the “expo-screen-orientation” library to implement the game in landscape mode. We then used basic React-Native components such as Image, TouchableOpacity, etc to create the interactive components. We used JavaScript along with the “state hooks” in React to implement the logic for pressing the buttons and getting the appropriate output. Lastly, we deployed the application on a phone using expo-tunnel (initially attempted with LAN but wouldn’t get Wi-Fi connectivity!) We specifically chose React-Native for the application as it is easy to create cross-platform applications and we also have the most experience with it.

What's next for STEMKids

We want to develop a front and back-end version of our app, with fully interactive features such as allowing users to completely customize their profiles and settings. The following tech stack would ideally be used to complete this task:

For game development, we will use Unity, a tool to create animations and interactive games. This will also require us to be familiar with the languages C++ and C#.

To integrate native features, we can use Swift for Apple OS and Kotlin for Android

As used in our demo, we will continue to use React Native, a JavaScript open-source framework. This tool enables us to build real mobile apps with JavaScript which are cross-platform.

For data storage we will use Amazon S3, an object storage service that offers data security and performance.

We will use Google Analytics to collect data from our app that will provide insight into our product. Additionally, we will make use of Jira, a project management software where we can track our progress during the development phase.

Built With

• expo-cli
• figma
• javascript
• react
• react-native