Inspiration
As teenagers, we’re liable to an infinite amount of laziness. One example is how lazy we get to access the school website for math homework. With the stress of Pre-Calc, we get homework practically every day, making this problem extremely relevant to our daily lives. Through research, we were able to identify multiple ways of resolving this issue. Given that no one else has provided the unique solution that we are suggesting, we believe our product has the spark it requires to solve this issue.
What it does
Our solution to this issue is Amazon Agenda. What we’ve been able to do is program our Amazon Alexa to provide an individual with the designated math homework upon the user’s request. The user would ask Alexa the homework for the day, and Alexa would answer with the correct pages, numbers, and homework for the day.
How I built it
Our skill takes on a new, innovative approach to this problem, by accessing the teacher calendar, parsing the website to extract the data, reading it from an Amazon lambda function, and outputting the information to the user. Upon initial research, we considered using the school’s API to automate the process. When we learned that the API was not public, we felt the next logical option to streamline the process was to rely on parsing through Python modules such as BeautifulSoup to collect all the homework and input it into Amazon’s Lambda Function and Developer Console, to pair it up with the Alexa. The current skill has a broad range, benefitting any student in Mrs. Friedman’s math classes.
Challenges I ran into
As stated above, one major challenge we ran into was trying to obtain the school's API which would have significantly streamlined the process of collecting data from our math teacher's calendar and output it to our students. Moreover, when we first started we had an issue of getting the lambda function to properly recognize the slot types we had already programmed in the Amazon developer portal.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are very proud of not only how we worked together as a team, but the amount we accomplished over the course of 24 hours. Every member of our team had been coding for a year or less, and the progress we were able to make in that one day is truly amazing for us. In the end, our Amazon skill was working and was able to perform the functions expected of it.
What I learned
Through this project, I learned how to properly utilize the Amazon developer console and amazon web services. Moreover, I gained a more thorough understanding of object-specific programming in python. We also learned how to properly define slot types, connect them to lambda functions, how to use specific modules such as BeautifulSoup and Pandas, and so much more.
What's next for Amazon Agenda
In the future, we hope to improve upon our project and have it be able to output the homework for any given day in the entire year for any teacher in our school. We would also like to develop an app to work in conjunction with our skill that would work as a students homework agenda.
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