I’d thought of making a word quizzer as a web application to improve my vocabulary when I took the GRE test a couple of years back. I’d written one in Visual Basic 6 when I wrote SAT :), but desktop applications are boring!
I got inspired to bring my long standing idea to fruition and the outcome is Wordza.
Wordza is a smart word quizzing service designed to help you rapidly learn new words. It adapts to your level and continually challenges you to get better. Preparing for GRE/SAT/CAT? Use Wordza 15 minutes a day.
Questions have difficulty ratings ranging between 1 and 100. The ratings are derived from user activity. A question is easy if a lot of people get it right and difficult when very few do!
You start at difficulty level 50. If you get three questions right in a row, you drive up the difficulty level a notch. On the other hand, answering a question wrong will reduce the difficulty level by one.
If you are interested in the implementation … I used Python, MySQL behind Apache to get this up. When I started making it, I wanted to keep it simple and make it work fast. I hope I’ve met both these requirements. Do give it a try and let me know what you think.
Tags: quiz, vocabulary, web, word, wordza
srid wrote,
The way I prepared for GRE is 1) attend James’ classes (in Chennai) 2) steal his idea to create this - http://nearfar.org/words/
Link | April 28th, 2008 at 8:29 am
srid wrote,
source code - http://repo.or.cz/w/greclusters.git?a=tree
Link | April 28th, 2008 at 8:33 am
prashanthellina wrote,
Cool. I like the idea. Nice colors. Very pleasant. I liked the “What is this?”. The “on hover” meaning info is great! Where did that data come from? Wordnet?
Link | April 28th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
srid wrote,
The dictionary data is from wordnet. See dict.py in the source tree. The cluster data is from some random guy’s class notes (PDF) taken in James sir’s classes.
Link | April 28th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Vinay wrote,
This is really a smart app! Wish I had one before my GRE exam! The app. is very clean and sweet.. congrats Prashanth and the name is even prettier.. I hope you took advantage of the domain generator to come up with this name? Good luck, will blog about this and place a link on my site to WordZa!
Cheers!
Link | April 29th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
prashanthellina wrote,
Vinay, glad you liked it! Hehe… I did not use the domain name generator for this one. I got the name idea from songza.com
Link | May 4th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Giselle wrote,
I would like to place wordza as a widget in my blog on wordpress. DO you have the code for the same?
Giselles last blog post..The silver lining
Link | October 8th, 2008 at 9:39 am