Getting school kids to create Alexa skills

Question

question

MrGuest asked · Dec 05, 2017 at 10:08 AM

Getting school kids to create Alexa skills

Good morning everyone,

I know this may not be the best place to get help, but I've contacted Amazon and as yet have had no response.

I want to create a club at my secondary school in the UK where students learn to develop their own Alexa skills. While it is hard to predict what Computer Science will look like when they go into the industry, I do predict that voice and ubiquitous computing will be very important.

Do you think creating Alexa skills would be accessible to 11-16 year olds? and are there any good beginners guides/videos/tutorials about that might be useful for them?

For the kids to get a really enriching experience I would ideally want to work with Amazon on this, so if anyone has any contacts that I could get in touch with, I'd really appreciate you passing their details on, or asking them to get in touch with me.

Thanks for your time and I'm sorry to interrupt if this isn't relevant to you.

skill alexa skills challenge kid skills

0 · Show 3

10 |2000 characters needed characters left characters exceeded

Attachments: Up to 2 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 524.3 kB each and 1.0 MB total.

Jamie@Amazon ♦♦ · Dec 07, 2017 at 03:26 PM

Thanks for posting! Investigating this and will get back to you as soon as I have more.

Thanks,

Jamie

0 · Share ·

LiamDeLee · Dec 08, 2017 at 09:41 AM

i think 11-16 is kind of to big for this in my opinion.

15-16 can prob try and copy paste around and try to understand how it is going and build it kind of from start to finish with support.

11-14 i think is just to young to do it from start to finish, what i can suggest and might be fun to do is just create the talking part, what do i mean by this. let them think about how people may ask question and let them think about utterances and these things, let them think about what they want to do with this skill and make it a group project where the younger once are more of the front end developers so to speak the older once are the techies that will do the lambda function and back-end.

i think this way you might bring it to a succes for the whole group. you can also make a skill yourself where they can ask question to that thye might encounter and give an answer this might be a fun starter because it is generic and a really easy to start project (look up the facts skill here)

if you need any more help feel free to contact me because i am also working with kids and never even thought about Alexa skills because i am always way to deep into it.

0 · Share ·

Jamie@Amazon ♦♦ · Dec 08, 2017 at 01:48 PM

We have some great resources on our developer website which should get you started. We also have a repository over here which has a bunch of useful stuff to get started.

I'd agree with Liam. The older kids might be able to get a firm understanding of things, but not sure how involved the younger kids would be. The frontend is one thing (in terms of building the interaction model); where they will really need to learn is the coding ability needed to create a really good skill.

Unfortunately, Amazon usually works on skill building with students 18+, though I do believe there are some organisations out there who are already working with kids (ie. futureCoders). Might be worth getting in touch!

0 · Share ·

2 Answers

Answer 1 · 2018-11-10T04:30:34Z

richard.w answered · Nov 10, 2018 at 04:30 AM

MrGuest, we actually have been doing that in 4 school districts for elementary kids. The youngest grade is 5th grade and they have published their skills.

If you would like to speak, call me 714-253-4669

0 · Share

10 |2000 characters needed characters left characters exceeded

Attachments: Up to 2 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 524.3 kB each and 1.0 MB total.

Answer 2 · 2017-12-11T15:27:07Z

futureCodersSE answered · Dec 11, 2017 at 03:27 PM

Hi @MrGuest Jamie's advice resonates well with my experience. Older students might get it but it will be very difficult for younger students.

At futureCodersSE we are generally working with 16-19 year olds and we are currently running coding workshops where attendees are learning to develop Alexa skills. They are currently learning to write lambda functions in Java and it is very challenging. The main sticking point is the number of development environments that they need to use. They use Eclipse to develop and test the Lambda, they need to have an AWS account in order to upload the Lambda (I set us up as an organisation and created accounts for students which are only valid while they are attending workshops and will be wiped and used by the next cohort after that. As a school, you could possibly become an AWS Educate institution which could allow your students to get AWS accounts without credit card details). They need to have a Developer account (uses the same credentials and is linked to the AWS account even though you need to set it up separately) in order to develop the Alexa skill using the development interface and generate some test data. They need to understand how the skill and the lambda find each other (ARNs) and to have a basic understanding of the two main classes needed (SpeechletRequestStreamHandler and Speechlet) to manage speech sessions and bespoke processing for the skill. The constant need to jump back and forth between systems is challenging for even the older students and I had to put a lot of scaffolding in place. They are managing it, just. It was very difficult to know where to start (lambda or skill) so that the process made sense.

I created this diagram to help with the understanding of how it all fits together:

For younger students, I would recommend using thestoryline.io. This is a lovely system that allows you to create, test and deploy Alexa skills graphically. It does require the user to have a Google account (this can be problematic in schools) and an Amazon account (again - this is problematic unless you register with AWS Educate). However, if you get it set up for your students to use they will be able to create some useful skills quite quickly and can deploy them so that they can test them on EchoSim.io or on a device set up for their AWS account. They could, potentially, publish their skills although I don't know what the protocol would be for this on the AWS Educate programme.

TheStoryline.io can be a good introduction to the Amazon Alexa development interface for your students as once they have deployed a skill through thestoryline.io, they can then open the skill in the Alexa development interface to inspect the settings, sample utterances, intents, etc. This way they can gain an understanding. before trying to create a lambda function that programmatically deals with intents and the sequencing logic.

I would be happy to talk with you about my experiences with Alexa if it would help.

how-is-a-skill-built-and-stored.jpg (69.9 kB)

examplestorylineskill.jpg (23.1 kB)

0 · Show 1 · Share

10 |2000 characters needed characters left characters exceeded

Attachments: Up to 2 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 524.3 kB each and 1.0 MB total.

Jamie@Amazon ♦♦ · Dec 12, 2017 at 11:59 AM

Thanks for responding!

0 · Share ·

Getting school kids to create Alexa skills

question details

Related Questions