Inspiration
We were excited when we heard about the ability to rent hardware to use for our project. Half of the team is involved in linguistics and we liked the idea of working with voice recognition software (Alexa). One of our members has been studying for the GREs and we thought that a fun way to study using Alexa would be to make her use the words in an interactive way with the user. Eventually it turned into this game.
What it does
It's a game with various functions. The user can ask for definitions of words in the app's GRE word list. They can also play a "normal" type of memorization game in which they simply learn definitions and must later recall them, or an "association" type, in which they make connections with people they really know.
How we built it
We used Amazon AWS and Alexa ASK to make most of the game. We also had to use some python and ruby to sort the words that we used as the data. Alexa's coding is in javascript.
Challenges we ran into
We had quite a number of challenges. None of us were experts in javascript so sometimes we would get tripped on simple syntax errors. Also, there were some functions that didn't work in conjunction with how Alexa operates. For example, Alexa would come out of any kind of loops if we tried to incorporate a verbal response, so we had to use more creative ways of looping actions.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of getting past the challenges that we faced. It was exciting to play around with Alexa every time we updated the code and could see another feature work right in front of us. We're all very happy to have this game to show off.
What we learned
We learned a lot about how the Alexa technology works as well as general coding skills especially in javascript.
What's next for GRE Association Game
We would like to increase the data used for GRE words and develop new features besides just relating GRE adjectives to people (perhaps we could create new functions to relate nouns to places or things like that)
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