Sample Question From the EduGotchi
The EduGotchi User Companion

Inspiration

Ever since the emergence of the digital age and rise in short form content, it has been apparent that children's and student's attention spans and cognitive abilities have dwindled. The reality is that many busy parents utilize devices such as iPads to keep their child occupied, unintentionally damaging the foundation for their future cognitive abilities. We wanted to see if there is any possible solution for this problem to where we were inspired by the 2000's toy, "Tamagotchi" when brainstorming. We wanted to see if we can bring an old famous technology and utilize its cute and simple nature to improve the education for the next generation.

What it does

Our project, "The EduGotchi", provides the user with a customizable digital companion to help encourage and support them throughout their education journey. The EduGotchi is a hand held toy/device that contains subjects ranging from basic knowledge and fundamental math to algebra. As the user completes questions, the problems they are given increases in difficulty, matching the user's educational development. As the difficulty increases, their companion levels up with visual features. Additionally, parents will be able to access the EduGotchi website in order to track their child's development.

How we built it

We developed our project by first brainstorming how we can bring our desired ideas and features to life. After planning, we settled on our components being a potentiometer, ESP32-S3, MPU 6050, SSD1327, and TBK Buzzer.

Challenges we ran into

The greatest challenge that we ran into as a group was implementing the OLED Screen, as when we first prototyped our first design the display was not working. At first, we did not know why, which we turned to debugging for a few hours. After hours of troubleshooting and seeing no difference in results, we headed to the Makerspace studio to solder a header into the OLED screen, which finally fixed our greatest problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The accomplishment that we are most proud of is developing a full working project despite the multitude of setbacks we have faced first entering the competition. Being faced with a numerous amount of challenges that seemingly prevented any sign momentum to develop, we were initially very discouraged. However, after an all-nighter, we managed to debug and push through all of the problems we have faced to create a project that replicates to what we have imagined as a team.

What we learned

Something that we learned as a team is to constantly push through no matter how many setbacks we face in the beginning.

What's next for The EduGotchi

The nest step for the EduGotchi is too make it as user customizable as possible with the introduction of features of users being able to create their own companions to help them throughout their education journey.