Mathieu Tozer's Dev Blog

Just some thoughts I had while showering half an hour ago:

Essentially Words is like a really personalised dictionary, with a small number of features built on top of it.

As to whether there is actual, researched evidence as to the educational value of the project, all I currently have to go by is my background in learning languages.

The nature of words isn't to provide a whole environment for learning languages. It is but one tool. And the user is still expected to create their own content to populate their word lists.

Flash Cards work, and there are multitudes of flash card apps out there (are they easy to code or something?) but as with their analogue counterparts where they fall behind is in the preparation of cards. Write on front, write on back. Repeat. And before you even start doing that you have to decide which words you need to learn, and look them all up in the dictionary! With Words that part should be automated.

All this shuffling around of words and their meanings must start the brain remembering them, but I still think there would be more benefit in automating the creation of the cards so that users can just get straight into drilling them.

The existing apps require manual entry of the vocabulary you want on the cards into long lists.

In retrospect, my answers to the greatest frustrations and the greatest things that I described about my course are contradictory. I complained that there is too much low level, command line programming going on (writing disk formatters for example) and that there isn’t enough, say, OO, application specific programming going on, which is my main interest.

But I also said that I love the fact that the course is broad enough for me to go and learn the stuff that I am mostly interested in, that it gives me the basis to learn higher level stuff.

But it’s because of that non specific, low level theory that I am able to do that. So yeah, a contradiction.

I've got the AUC scholarship phone interview today. Wishing me luck!

Also the Comic Life Japanese Localisation should be ready by the end of today. It's taken much longer than I'd hoped, but it will be very satisfying to see the finished product!

SORRY ABOUT THE BAD FORMATTING ON THIS PAGE AT THE MOMENT!!!!

Update:
It's done! Thanks to for the opportunity. Look forward to hearing from you in the next week or two.

And

It's done! I've just got to pack up a few things and prepare the Japanese localisations of Comic Life.

And then I'm off to the gym for a punishing workout :-)










--