note: I’m going to be posting some projects over the next few days. This is the first one. Next up– the second one.
I’ve been subscribed to Dictionary.com’s word-of-the-day email service for awhile… not so that someday I can flex an over-sized vocabulary as a form of pathetic bragging, but so that I can understand someone if they are using those words and, plus, sometimes words can be kinda fun ( one of my favorite is defenestration ).
The problem is that I haven’t really learned any words from Dictionary.com’s word-of-the-day service. I log into my email account and glance through the word-of-the-day email. Within 5 minutes I forget the word’s definition. Within 10 minutes I forget the word. ( I guess this progression of forgetting is slightly better than forgetting the word first and then the definition. )
The cause of my forgetfulness, is, of course, my own personal laziness and lack of self-motivation to spend even a single minute trying to commit the word to memory. However, Dictionary.com’s word-of-the-day (and all the other word-of-the-day services I’ve seen) makes this easy to “get away with.”
So over winter-break I spent some time trying to make a word-of-the-day service that forces the user into taking a bit more time and using a bit more mental effort… which I hope translates into remembering more words.
Here is a quick walk-through of the service:
^ “Yay! A word in my email. Gosh technology, you’re amazing!”
^ So this is the contents of the email. It’s basically just a link to the word’s page.
^ If the user knows the word, he/she can click I know this word. Otherwise the user types the word and then makes a guess at its definition. Upon clicking submitAnswer the user is taken to the next page.
^ This page lists the actual definition of the word. The user then provides an example sentence which uses the new word. After the example is submitted to the website, the user is quizzed with some review words.
^ The examples that the user has previously entered for each word appear at the top of the page as context hints to remind the user of the word’s definition. The website tracks the user’s uncertainty on each word. The more uncertain a word is, the more likely that word will come up in the review period. The uncertainty of a word is computed simply based on the number of examples the user has submitted for the word and the number of times the user has clicked I know this word.
Well that’s that. There are a number of changes/improvements that could be made ( my brother had several good ideas ) but I’m too lazy to type them here. I’m also too lazy to actually run this word-of-the-day service ( though it is very easy to run ), so if anyone is interested and knows some basic PHP and mySQL stuff for setting things up, I’d be happy to make the code available.