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Echo show screen
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Echo show screen
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Echo show screen
Inspiration
Fundamentally, just as it is necessary to know the alphabet for reading, or multiplication tables for arithmetic, it is also necessary to learn geography to know where places are, and also some facts about those places so you can tell why they are different. Geography, History, and Civics are seldom taught in classrooms today, which is a major concern considering the increasing focus on globalization and the world economy.
Future leaders who are oblivious of geographical knowledge will have a hard time analyzing world events and making rational decisions, let alone understanding basic physical systems of everyday life, like implications of the solar system on climate, water cycles, ocean currents, etc.
There are not many games or internet content that provide fun as well as learning for kids. It would be nice if we have a friend or companion that can talk, play as well as teach our kids.
When I heard about Alexa couple of years back, I started watching closely and at sometime I thought this would be game changer, especially for kids, and here you go.... I was right!
Power of geography
5 things kids learn from geography
- Citizenship
- Economics
- History
- Environment
- Understand The World
If kids learn geography, then when they hear a story on the news from across the globe, they will actually have an idea of where Kenya, or at least Africa, is. They will also know that Africa is not a country! And if Ebola breaks out in one African country, that doesn’t mean that all of Africa is affected.
What skill does?
The skill provides fun and engaging stories and tales around the world for children of all ages with interesting facts about the place. What's new in this? Just stories?. Stories are the best way to have fun and learn. The stories are invoked from the skill based on country or place. The amazing world tales teaches kids about places, people, and their culture. This can be a nice bedtime story alternative as well. The skill indirectly provides useful information through stories and facts. There more than 25 countries and stories with many interesting facts to listen.
What is unique about the skill?
- The short stories available in the skill are unique and carefully picked up from different part of the countries in the world.
- The stories are invoked from the skill based on country name.
- There more than 25+ countries and stories available.
- Skill allows user to set the speech speed (slow, medium or normal)
- Along with stories, the skill provide interesting facts about the place, that allows kids to learn about, places and people.
- The skill was purposefully kept simple without complex flows so that even kids can enable and use them under the guidance of parents.
- The skill is also enabled on the Echo show devices with pictures, stories and facts displayed on the screen.
How I built it
The skill was developed using aws alexa skill sdk, and S3 storage (for storing audio files).
Challenges I ran into
I have developed many alexa skills and published to alexa store. However, developing a skill targeting kids are definitely challenging. It requires lots of focus, analysis, content validation and sometime we need become kids ourselves to understand from their point of view.
A huge amount was required to carefully collect stories, pictures that are applicable and relevant to kids. Many thanks to Amazon and Devpost for providing crash course and guidance for developing skill for kids. This made my life a lot easier; definitely not a rocket launch.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Developing skills for kids are not easier and am definitely proud now and will be even prouder when the skill is used by kids around the world and benefited. Also, definitely, a proud dad as well!
What I learned
A lot!, learning never stops since I started on developing alexa skill. Following are key learning.
- AWS and power of Lambda functions.
- Keep things simple.
- How to think from kids point of view.
- It will take only 2 minutes to develop a simple alexa skill.
What's next for Amazing World Tales!
Make it extensible by allowing parents and others to create their own stories and publish it.
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