Inspiration
In thinking of innovative ways to introduce AI to a diverse range of elementary school aged kids, we decided to create a mobile-friendly app that brings back a ’90s Classic kid favorite - the Tamagotchi virtual pet.
Given how 53% of children in the United States own a smartphone by the age of 11 and that parents can be motivated to suggest starting with virtual pets instead of a living one, we created a way for children to adopt a dog named fAIdo, who will go on to teach kids about responsibility, AI, and more.
What it does
fAIdo is a virtual pet that introduces AI concepts through interacting with users - kids(!).
How we built it
We built the states and interactions with virtual pet using Java and Twilio. Because virtual pets require time for specific states and interactions to happen, we built an interface that walks through onboarding and sample scenarios on demand using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Our vision is also to have fAIdo available via web whereby you can interact with it via Web and from mobile devices.
Challenges we ran into
While we had trouble with setting up IDE to go through Twilio tutorials when dependencies appeared to be missing and the Twilio library wasn't recognized, we did get it to work and interact with the code. We also designed the interface in a way that was easy to edit for others who are not familiar with coding syntax, but we ran into issues with allowing for clicking to move on to next dialog box without skipping any after receiving options.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We came up with a unique hackathon project that allowed us to explore concepts we were interested in!
What we learned
A whole lot about Twilio and creating a more user-friendly way of editing and customizing a story. We also had a crash course in git and github.
What's next for fAIdo
Bring it to the app store!
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