World Changers

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Inspiration

Learning can be pretty boring. Being told what is important to you is a quick way to kill your interest in it. Most children develop an interest from role models or people they aspire to. My own love of technology has time and time been stoked not by a physics lecture but seeing, reading and hearing the stories of the people I look up to. Knowing fortune 500 company's started in a garage and household names have been told no and no countless times gave me the resilience to pursue my own passions without fear of failure or rejection.

The App

World changers is a platform that shares peoples stories in a simple game format. A random "world changer" is selected and then there story played out in 3 clues, getting more and more obvious each time.

The first clue is simple information; where they grew up, what there parents did, what they were interested in or something like that. This is important because it can often feel like you cant change things unless you were born into a certain circumstance. This shows you cant tell who someone is just by where they were born or what school they went to and that people have had huge impact from wildly different circumstances. This is designed to stop kids feeling alienated and reinforce they have control to make a positive change.

The second clue is designed to give more information but also highlight some bad points where the "world changer" struggled. This is because its very easy to see successful peoples victory's and so believe that you only have one chance. By highlighting that these influential people had down periods or failures it conveys the message that failure isn't bad and all is not lost when things go wrong.

The final clue shares the major success and is the most obvious. The point of world changers isn't to win or lose and the gamification is only for an initial hook.

After the final clue (whether guessed correctly or not) a summary is played. This shows how the persons passion, interest and persistence paid off in context. Then there is a final call to action for the user to think about how they might change the world.

I really hope that this skill can give children the confidence to try things, dream big and realise they have the potential to change the world.

Stack

I used JS and AWS Lambda for the skill. I used the new Alexa SDK with state handlers, webpack to bundle everything together and the ASK CLI to make an automatic build and upload script in NPM.

I also used my own Library (Splain) in order to add some dynamic properties to the text spoken.