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Bucks County Courier Times
With just four words, a tech-savvy Bucks County teen has simplified learning about upcoming events in Pennsylvania’s third-largest school district.
“Alexa — open Central Bucks.”
Tamanend Middle School eighth-grader Alaina Ahuja, 13, created an Amazon Alexa Skill for parents and students of the Central Bucks School District’s 23 schools. Alaina, who began coding at 6, says she first created the useful skill for Jamison Elementary while in the sixth grade.
“There were a lot of events going on at the time, and it was hard to keep track of them,” the Warwick Township resident said of her motivation to create the skill, which users can download from the Amazon store for their Amazon Alexa devices.
The Central Bucks skill lets parents and students stay up to date on what’s happening in their schools, including schedule changes due to inclement weather.
Users can say commands like, “Alexa — ask Central Bucks about Titus,” for event information on their campus.
The bright student recently migrated the skill over to Amazon Web Services and added new features like connecting it to the Central Bucks School District’s Twitter handle, showing users the district’s latest tweets.
“This one is kind of an optional feature, but if you have an Alexa device and if you allow it on your Alexa app, it can give you a yellow light notification anytime a tweet comes in about school closures through the CBSD Twitter handle,” said Alaina, who plans to become an entrepreneur when she’s older. “I’m working on a lot of different features to add to the skill, and I’m enhancing it regularly.”
She created it using the Alexa Developer Console and her knowledge of a programming language called Python. Alaina even offers a step-by-step tutorial of the skill-making process on her blog.
The Alexa Developer Console lets her see how many people are using her skill and which functionalities are most popular.
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“If I check for the last 30 days, there has been an increase of 32 new, unique customers and 35 new people have enabled the skill,” Alaina shared as she checked the stats.
“Seventy percent of people are using the upcoming events feature, and 15% of the people are using the Twitter feed,” she added.
Developing an Alexa skill sounds complicated, but it came naturally for the gifted problem solver, who made her first iOS iPhone app when she was in the fourth grade.
Inspired by her own tendency to misplace things, Alaina, then 9, created the lost-and-found app for her elementary school in New Jersey for its invention…
Read more:: Central Bucks student coder creates Amazon Alexa skill for district
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