Simple "word-scramble" stack

[Wilhelm Sanke]

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