STEMTrivia

Inspiration

From the very start, our team was driven to inspire STEM education. We believe in the future of our little engineers. Our idea was to develop a way to make learning about STEM more fun!

What it does

Our Android app is a trivia game focused on teaching little engineers about STEM. The voice-activated platform asks players multiple-choice questions and listens for answers. It then says if it's right or wrong.

How we built it

Originally we were building it as an Alexa skill app from scratch which eventually turned into a Java app after 2 continuous days of Alexa development. We have most of the Alexa skill trivia game code which has similar functionality to the Java app but we ran into major issues with AWS, which is why we switched tracks. Although, what's great is we have a working app and an almost working Alexa skill app, so we tried our hardest in this amount of time to get what we could done. We also created an open-source GitHub repo for Alexa documentation where we would upload our own helpful Alexa and AWS documentation since there are not many resources online for future hackathon attendees. (https://github.com/pk285/Alexa-Documentation-).

Challenges we ran into

Oh, we ran into quite some challenges. Our biggest challenge was working with AWS. Our node.js code wasn't wrong, and the game worked if you tested it every time we loaded it up to AWS, it gave us errors and if we changed any file, it definitely didn't work then. That was the biggest challenge by far but we got through it and didn't give up and kept hacking at it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of ourselves because we worked on a project where none of us had any experience with. We all learned something completely new and we are all still going to work on creating more Alexa skills. We pushed ourselves to the maximum because we wanted to see what we can accomplish in a short amount of time and we did accomplish a lot, so we can only imagine what we can accomplish in a whole week or month. Each one of our team members worked very hard and have contributed to this project development. Also, we were happy that our app was targeted towards kids and social good.