Education is becoming more and more digitized, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, schools and colleges alike have had to change their lesson deliveries to online learning. There is no doubt that students are struggling to engage with the content, while some are failing to participate all together due to distractions and other factors such as lack of internet connectivity. According to a report published in The New York Times, teachers at some schools have reported that more than half of their students are not participating in the online classes [1]. This means that students are not only falling behind in their learning, the sudden shift to online learning can also take a toll on their mental health [2].

Our mission is to create a learning platform for these students so they can learn quantitative skills in Mathematics and Science in a fun, challenging and engaging way. Mascots have been used in classrooms and are even used by businesses to increase the engagement customers have with the brand. Children in particular identify with mascots, they consider mascots to be their friend; when used in learning, mascots help entertain, they pose questions in fun ways and get the students to come up with creative solutions to the subjects they are studying, and they also help relax the students which in turn makes them more receptive to learning more complex topics [3]. 

We propose an interactive web application created using WordPress, and using HTML, the application will be fully functional with the interactive mascot Sal-E who will guide the users through the lessons and give pop-quizzes and tests to make sure the user is still engaging with the content and understanding the content. A sample lesson plan would be to have Sal-E explain how volcanos work, this course would feature a lot of animations with some comedy as well to make the student more receptive to learning the content. To create Sal-E, we used an open source 3D graphics design software called Blender. Other renderings of Sal-E were created using Vectary software. Once Sal-E was rendered, the next step would be to export the rendering to the HTML code of our interactive web application.

Once this is completed, the lesson content and structure would be added to the back-end of the web application, and the pop-quizzes, tests and dialogue would be programmed next. In order to allow the end-user to interact with the web application, we added JavaScript to the HTML code.