Vocab Venture

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  Our Title!

Inspiration

We wanted to find a way to help non-native english speakers, and others that wanted to widen their vocabulary, in order to learn and memorize harder english words.

What it does

The application presents users with flashcards that display a word. They can either test their understanding or widen their vocabulary by flipping the card to see the definition. To track the user's progress over time and to ensure that the user is exposed to all words in the vocabulary list we have implemented our version of shuffle mode — where no flashcard is repeated until all other flashcards have been displayed at least once

How we built it

We used python and tkinter to create an executable application. The application reads from a CSV file which contains a collection of advanced vocabulary words and their definitions. Then this CSV file is parsed and flashcard objects are created so that the tkinter view can be populated accordingly to display this information to the user.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we faced when building the Vocab Venture app was making the graphical user interface (GUI) user-friendly and intuitive. Initially, we used the standard tkinter library, however we found it to lack the level of functionality and design we needed to make the app user-friendly. We had to explore alternative libraries but we also knew that moving to a new library would have been infeasible given the time constraint. This led us to ctkinter, a wrapper over the tkinter library that allowed us to extend our existing tkinter application to be more visually appealing and user-friendly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of working together as a team, and collaborating to make this project. The way we found a solution to our GUI-problem (i.e. it not being user-friendly enough) by adapting our code to the ctkinter package, we believe was a flexible and creative way to adapt to the situation.

What we learned

• Technical skills — For most of us, using Tkinter was an entirely new experience. Building this application not only gave us an opportunity to develop technical skills regarding Tkinter but also in the general software-programming process of parsing documentation and StackOverflow support.
• Communication & Collaboration
  

What's next for Vocab Venture

Currently, Vocab Venture is only an executeable but it can be extended to be available in different formats (mobile, web, etc). Additionally, we want to add different game modes to Vocab Venture so it can teach and test vocabulary through varied approaches.

Built With

• python
• tkinter