stemlings

gamifying K-12 STEM education with AI

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💡 Inspiration

Our inspiration for stemlings was the desire to create a fun service that encourages K-12 students to cultivate an interest in STEM and to encourage them to come back each day to prepare for it.

✨ What is stemlings?

stemlings provides a website platform for students to login each day and practice solving a daily STEM related problem, generated by AI. In doing so, they can grow their stemling and earn accomplishments for their consistent practice.

⚒️ How we built it

We built stemlings using Next.js, a framework for creating server-rendered React websites, Tailwind CSS, a CSS framework with many pre-designed utility classes that can be used to build robust UIs, Auth0, an identity and access management (IAM) platform used for authentication and authorization, .Tech Domains, Upstash Redis, a cloud-based managed Redis database, and Vercel, a cloud platform for deploying web applications.

💢 Challenging moments

When using Auth0, we had challenges with navigating the different Development and Production client keys. In addition, we realized that the Redis database we had chosen to use did not seamlessly integrate with certain map requests from our application. This caused friction when integrating the authentication with the comment-post functionality in our main service. Ultimately, we remediated this by refactoring our Redis database files such that they would support the requests that we were originally unable to make.

🥂 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are especially proud of our UI/UX on our front-end. The interface represents a fun, friendly, and visually appealing design for young learners to navigate. The visual theme and cohesiveness support our application's primary purpose of motivating young learners to enjoy the process of daily STEM career preparation.

🧠 What we learned

Throughout the challenges and successes that we faced with our hack, we learned a lot about the complexities of backend API integrations within the context of full-stack web applications. Working with Cloudflare's APIs as well as Auth0 from Okta presented unique challenges pertaining to dependency consistency and configuration within deep portions of our directories. We sharpened our documentation navigation skills, backend skills, and our overall competence with diving into unfamiliar code bases and quickly grasping the key aspects of them.

🔮 What's next for stemlings?

stemlings presents a cute and fun novel way to encourage young learners to cultivate their interests in STEM and provides them with an enticing method of daily preparation to supplement that. We hope to continue building out the features that make the daily dedication to learning even easier with implementing notification systems that utilize ML to determine the best times of day to send an unintrusive and convenient reminder to complete a daily problem. In addition, continuing to build out one of the most enjoyable features of the application- growing your stemling- is an area we are hoping to continue development in, adding in more rewards and incentives to encourage exploration and consistency.

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