Wizard of Math

Inspiration

When I bought Alexa Echo buttons few months ago, my son and me had a great time playing different Echo button games like Trivial Pursuit. My 7 year old loves math, and I wanted to build a skill where I can spend quality time with him and also help him hone his skills. That's when the idea of "Wizard of Math" incubated. Instead of creating a regular quiz game, I wanted to make the skill exciting so built the skill with a fabric of magical theme.

Description

Wizard of Math is an exciting Math trivia woven with the fabric of magic. In professor Rumbledore's school of magic, students compete with each other in a math competition based on their level of expertise. Students can pick for the challenge, one of three difficulty levels, easy, medium or hard. Once the difficulty level is selected, professor Rumbledore will conduct a five round competition, where each round has four questions. Each student will be given a magic button, and the student who presses his magic button first will get a chance to cast his spell and answer Rumbledore's question. So, bring your wands out and get ready to cast magical spells at the Math competition in Rumbledore's school of Magic !

Technical Details

The skill leverages various AWS services like:

• Lambda : There are two lambda functions. One hosts the Alexa skill and the other is a microservice that generates random questions from over hundred questions templates across three difficulty levels.
• Dynamo DB : Stores the game state. So, if the skill exits in the middle of the game, the players can still continue from where they left off.
• Cloudfront + S3: All static assets are stored in S3 fronted with a Cloudfront distribution, so these assets are available on the edge for fast retrieval.
• CloudWatch: For logging, monitoring and alerting.
• API Gateway: The question and answer service is made available through the API gateway.
• Amazon Polly: We have leveraged Amazon Polly indirectly through Alexa Skills Kit, to customize the voice of the main character to be more native to the user's locale. ( US or UK )

Alexa Skill Kit:

The skill was built with nodeJS ASK V2 SDK. This was my first time building a skill in nodeJS and it was great learning experience.

The skill has also been built for Echo with a display. We have used BodyTemplate1, Body Template 3 and Body Template 7.

Internationalization

The skill has been submitted for both US and UK locales. We have used the newest Alexa Polly Voice Integration to change the voice of the main character to be more native to their locales. For USA we have used Joey and UK we have used Brian ( who I feel definitely sounds like a Wizard ! )

What makes the skill special ?

Since the skill provides the user an ability to select their level of expertise, it provides everyone with varying levels of skill to have a challenging and at the same time a great experience. With over hundred different question templates, and an API that randomly picks questions, players can keep coming back multiple times and get a brand new experience Also, with a nice magical theme, it will make learning math interesting and mystical ! My hope is that many parents would get to spend great time with their children just like me.

So why wait, to get started just say: Alexa, open wizard of math and follow the instructions. Everything should be self explanatory. If you need help, just say "Alexa, help".