Simple "word-scramble" stack
James Cass
cassj at earthlink.net
Sat Feb 19 08:11:37 EST 2005
Wilhelm -
That's a very cool stack! Just by coincidence the first word that came
up for me was "garden". However, when I saw the scrambled letters, I
saw a true, one-word anagram for "garden", "danger". Let's not get
into the psychological reasons for that ;-P So, it now seems
another enhancement would be to check for one word anagrams of the same
set of scrambled letters. :-)
-James
On Feb 19, 2005, at 7:46 AM, Wilhelm Sanke wrote:
> While visiting a family with a third-grader I noticed a (written)
> foreign-language exercise that used scrambled words. As the father of
> the third-grader had an older Metacard version on his computer, I sat
> down and produced a computer version of the exercise, which the young
> child seemed to like very much. I added a standalone splash screen to
> enable the young user to make changes to the lexicon and add words of
> her own choice.
>
> I think such a stack belongs in the category "for revolution novices"
> like Klaus Major's "memory" stack or my stack "seminar01", which (the
> latter) - among other examples - contains directions to build a basic
> vocabulary trainer with gradually increasing complexity.
>
> I have added the scramble-word stack to my website
> <www.sanke.org/MetaMedia> on page "Sample Stacks" and "Tools for
> Development".
> A screenshot can be seen here
> <http://www.sanke.org/Metamedia/Screenshots.htm>.
> Direct download from
> <http://www.sanke.org/Software/simplewordscramble.zip> (11 KB).
>
> The stack is an example of a "guided" exercise, where the focus is on
> "learning" and not on "testing", two pairs of shoes which are very
> often mixed up. Support - the "guidance" - for the learner is offered
> in various ways:
>
> 1. When the learner types into the input field, the typed letters
> disappear from the scramble field. Only letters contained in the
> scramble field can be typed into the input field, otherwise a
> "warning" will appear.
>
> 2. If the user deletes letters from the input field, they reappear in
> the scramble field; the learner can move the cursor inside the input
> field using the arrow keys, then press the backspace key to remove the
> letter on the left of the cursor.
>
> 3. You can re-scramble the word to possibly get a better idea what the
> word could be.
>
> 4. Pressing "Help" shows the first and last letter of the sought word
> and displays dashes as placeholders for the remaining letters in
> between.
>
> 5. Button "more letters", which appears after first pressing button
> "Help", adds more - randomly selected - letters to the help field. The
> last two dashes in a word however remain, the user has to find out
> them on his/her own.
>
> "Simple" as it is, the exercise card of the stack needs 25 controls to
> achieve the described basic functionality and 8 of them contain
> scripts. The longest script is that of the input field, which controls
> the features 1. and 2. explained above. This script makes use of the
> "offset" function, "returninfield" and "rawkey" handlers, and the
> "selectedchunk" function, the last one to determine the place of the
> insertion point in the input field. A special problem comes up when
> you have to deal with special "national" characters, because the
> "rawkey" values in this case are different from the "numtochar"
> values; therefore I included some script lines to take care of the
> German "Umlaute" (ä, ö, ü).
>
> Enhancements to the stack could added in many directions; in a
> workshop for Revolution newbies I would - as an example - assign the
> tasks
>
> a) to display a translation along with the scrambled word, and
>
> b) to add the possibility to export the lexicon to an external text
> file and to import from a choice of external files.
>
>
> --Wilhelm Sanke
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> use-revolution mailing list
> use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
>
More information about the use-livecode
mailing list