HeyKids!

I have been waiting patiently for the immersive full-time cohort to end. I'm not it wasn't challenging at all, but I honestly never really felt under pressure.

Final project review has come. I wanted to build something different than the majority students build like, twitter/facebook clones, recipe apps, google maps app just something beyond CRUD.....

I decided to build an education application for children called HeyKids! that teaches math, pronunciation, and vocabulary. I wanted to implement IBM's Watson AI for Speech Recognition, but I was running into issues with Rails and IBM's SDK, so I started working with Google's Speech API.

Login System

I used JWT for authentication and to maintain user's logged in state, on server side BCyrpt encryption magic is taking care of storing sensitive user information.

State management

Redux-Thunk. I feel like the learning curve on Redux is insane. In the beginning you honestly have zero idea what's going on, but once you get comfortable with it, it's super easy.

You also have to keep that in mind that these actions are async.

Voice Recoginion

Google Voice API Speech-To-Text
Honestly it didn't take me to long to learn how to use the API, the docs are amazing.

Game

The game has three categories:

• Math problem solving
• Word spelling exercise
• Identifying objects based on a picture

Each section have different gamerules. If you give the correct answer you get a "score" else you get a "mistake" that persist to the database right away, and renders to client side through a Redux action.

Here is a demo video about how the game works and operates. I'm planning to deploy it on laptop/desktop browsers, and I have already started working on a React Native app for cell phones and tablets.

Keep coding,
Olly