The Skill has three branches: Fact of the Day, Resource Guide, and Quiz. These serve the purpose to provide the user with a daily fact, to link module chapters to relevant pages in the recommended textbooks for both course content and practice problems, and to quiz the student, respectively.
The Fact of the Day Skill reads out a single fact each day related to the first-year UCL Physics module: Atoms, Stars and the Universe. The Skill is written such that the facts are read out in synchronicity with lecture content. This way, students can hear content at home that reinforces what has been discussed in class. Upon completion of the lecture course, the facts are read out randomly. The advantage of Fact of the Day is the speed of use. The full interaction with the Skill could take less than 10 seconds, ideal for users with little time to spare. All facts are stored within a database. The number of facts provided is chosen to match the number of days in term, such that all facts can be heard without repetition throughout teaching. As such, the length of the database would need to be re-evaluated each year according to the length of Term 1. The Skill works by calculating the number of days elapsed between the current date and the start date of Term 1, which is written manually into the code. During term time, this value is modulated and used as an index to retrieve a fact from the database. After Term 1, this value is used as a seed for a random number generator to retrieve a random fact.
The Quiz Skill asks the user 8 questions, which were created from the module notes to help the user learn in an engaging manner. There are 86 unique questions of various types, ranging from recalling basic facts to numerical calculations, with the aim to both keep the user interested and encompass the material in the module. The Quiz keeps track of the user’s score and tells the user the correct answer if they get the question wrong. The questions are structured to limit the phrasing of correct answers so that the current quality of speech recognition is less of a limiting factor; for example, a leading question like, “Is an E0 elliptical galaxy completely round or elongated?" encourages the user to respond either “round” or “elongated”, which makes identifying a correct answer easier.
The Resource Guide Skill refers users to specific sections in textbooks should they wish to investigate topics in more depth. Users may ask Alexa, "where can I find out about...", followed by a topic, to invoke the Skill. Utterances have been included for each topic as well to allow multiple inputs, such as “Chandra Limit” as well as “Chandrasekhar Limit”. Due to copyright issues, the Skill does not reproduce information directly from textbooks. A resource array was built to store the sources, with each topic being associated with a textbook and relevant page and section numbers. In addition, relevant practice problems in the textbook are included where available. Due to the amount of information presented, a Card with a copy of the information will be sent to the Alexa App. The topics currently covered can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rlfzdpsnyofoes7/Topics.pdf?dl=0
market
