Accessible learning? Child-oriented? Making math…fun?
When we were brainstorming ideas, we kept coming back to the idea of learning in an accessible manner, regardless of a person's circumstance or what technology they have access to. We also realized that learning anything, especially Math, can be very challenging for young children, especially if they’ve never used a computer before. So, we thought “what if we combined those two ideas?”
That’s how we came up with mathimati.co, a program that combines these ideas to make learning Math for young children interactive, accessible, and most of all, fun!
Mathemati.co, as the name suggests, is all about learning math! When you run the program, you’ll see a colourful, visually appealing interface perfect for young children. All of the numbers from 0-9 are perfectly laid out on the top row, with the operations here on the bottom row, and boxes for the numbers and equation signs here.
Your goal is to get the random number the program generates. And it’s pretty simple, you just move your hand, drop of the numbers, and get the equation here! The program will print a success message when you’re correct, and a failure message when you’re wrong
Mathematic.co was built in Python using OpenCV, Mediapipe and PyGame. Mediapipe was used for the hand tracking, allowing a point on the hand to be mapped to a point in the game. OpenCV was used for transferring the input from a camera to the computer itself. PyGame was used to create all of the objects in the game, such as the letters, boxes, equals sign, circles, all of that!
Building a fully fledged application in just 36 hours is very tough.
At our last hackathon, Deltahacks X, we chose to create a proof of concept since Adam was busy with clubs at McMaster that same day, but since we had more time for Deerhacks, we wanted to make it as perfect as possible. But with Adam and Gavin having to arrive late due to school and work, that still cut the time we had to design to just about 24 hours. We worked super hard for the entire time we had, but that isn’t a lot of time. We had so many ideas to expand on, but had to scrap a lot of them to fit within the time constraint.
We also had a whole lot of trouble splitting up the project which led to a huge time crunch right near the end.
I’m really proud of myself for being able to do the front end with PyGame! I’ve always wanted to learn PyGame, and simply creating the objects was a very fun experience for me! I was able to write the vast majority of code myself, and was really happy I was able to apply everything from high school computer science and my engineering course at McMaster to this project - Adam
Time management and proper planning is everything in a hackathon. We had so many ideas of what we could do, but we realized that, above all, it’s super important to narrow our focus to a manageable idea that can actually be done within a 36 hour time frame. As we mentioned it led to a huge time crunch near the end of the project as we were all super reliant on each other’s parts of the project.
Next time, it’s very important for us to split up the project in a way that’s more manageable, so we can get work done more efficiently…and actually get sleep too.
There’s so many ways our idea can be expanded upon! This includes… Adding multiplication and division Starting by only dragging one number instead of both Adding two digit numbers Creating a time limit so children have to solve as many questions as they can in a certain amount of time
All in all, this was a super fun project for us! Not only was it amazing to see an idea like this actually come to fruition, but it was amazing for us to all see each other again, with us all being at different universities today.
And with what we’ve created, the future is super bright when it comes to teaching Math to young children. By creating a program that’s interactive, accessible and fun, mathemati.co is perfect for helping everyone learn and excel at Math from a young age, all with just the wave of a hand!
Check out our project demo here!