Introducing KidKalc, a new way of motivating students to practice their math proficiency. Under this pandemic, we are isolated in our homes, and the elementary students’ education is being often undervalued for high school students’ priority. Enter the opening of KidKalc, as the solid backgrounds and text are typed telling you: Welcome to KidKalc. Developed by Omar Abdallah, Mohamed Elsayed, and Rami Ayeche, this website was developed for the Silicon Valley Hacks Hackathon, as our first hackathon project. Choose from a variety of grade levels to begin practicing ranging from simple Kindergarten problems, to much more complex problems of 5th grade. As you begin your quiz, you are given a quick overview of the rules and what you should do to begin your practice.
Slash through every problem taking your time without any pressure, for the priority is to master your mathematics skills without pressure. Later down the line, a speed mode is planned to be added to KidKalc for those who are looking for a much more significant challenge. When a question is answered correctly, a point is given to the player, and when a question is incorrect, a point is deducted. Once the player can collect 15 points, they are rewarded with a coin. This coin acts as a free entrance to hextris, an open-source game used as an exemplar for this prototype of the game. This may seem like a distraction to the students from their original work, but we believe otherwise. After gaining 15 points and rewarding the student for their hard work with a quick game and putting them back into mathematics after a quick loss, the student develops a motivation to continue practicing their maths to get back to playing their game. You may ask, what makes KidKalc so different from all other educational platforms? Well, we are happy to announce that KidKalc’s premise is built around, bringing a different approach to mathematics practice. Every question you complete will be different from the last, creating an authentic practice session and testing space, especially during these difficult times. Later down the line, the KidKalc team strives to create a much more complex system of algorithmically generated problems ranging from Algebra, geometric problems, to even unique well-structured word problems. All randomly generated making every problem different from the last.
Our website is built around javascript, HTML, and python all put together to create the seamless experience we designed. Our code for addition finds two random numbers while making sure that their sum does not exceed the boundary of what they should know while still including all the numbers possible from 0 onwards. For subtraction, it creates 2 random numbers then intentionally sorts them in order to ensure that the answer is never negative. For multiplication, it chooses 2 random numbers from the expected multipliers from the specific age group. For division, the code chooses from already prerecord answers to ensure that they are included in the required multipliers.
KidKalc is the future of modern mathematics practice and testing and with your help, we could achieve what we aspire. As beginners to a hackathon, this prototype of KidKalc is outside of our vision of how it could end up and we strive to improve the aesthetics, functionality, and user-friendliness of this website. Welcome to a future in which schools lean towards KidKalc as being the most tangible option to allow for brighter minds in a brighter future.