so cooked for spanish

My eldest kid needs to pass Spanish. So I've made an interactive game site to help her learn. When I told her, she posted online "so cooked for spanish my dads building me an app to learn it"

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Inspiration

I wanted to build something to solve a real problem, and one of my kids told me she wanted help learning Spanish. She has apps etc, but I thought, what if I could build something different and fun that she could use, and also give feedback on, to improve it and help me build it. So I told her what I was going to do, then she posted on TikTok "so cooked for spanish my dads making me an app to learn it" so ... I just had to call it So Cooked At Spanish

What it does

There are two main "games" to help the user learn new languages (not just Spanish!):

  • "Mysteries" - where the user works through clues to solve a mystery or a crime.
  • "Scenarios" - where the user choose answers as they work through a scenario, like how to get to the train station, or how to get groceries for dinner.

I originally just had the mysteries, but my daughter said they'd be good for improving vocabulary, but we should still have slightly easier scenarios to learn from.

  • At each stage of the games, the user can listen to Spanish, see translations, and type or speak back answers. OpenAI 5.6 calls give feedback in real-time on the user's answers.

  • And it's not just Spanish - one of my daughter's friends asked could we add German, so we added German ... and French, Irish, Japanese, Italian, Polish and Lakota (where we could, hard to get good Lakota translations)!

  • We also added the ability to change what language you're learning from i.e. if you speak French and want to learn Irish, you can do that!

How we built it

Almost entirely with Codex!! One massive session over several days! Question after question!

Challenges we ran into

Getting the actual content to be meaningful and useful. It took iterations and patience, and testing!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting it built and deployed - yes, it's out there in the real world as a live site!

As this is basically now a production site, I built also:

  • A local admin page to make it easier to change the content.
  • A local admin page with usage stats (of both user usage, and how many tokens & OpenAI calls we're making as users use the games).
  • Fin-ops: I've added email alerting if token usage goes over configurable thresholds.

What we learned

How to use agentic coding - I would give Codex large tasks, then go off and do other things around the house - cook food, watch some football, then go back to see how it got on. It's such a different way of developing but it's great.

What's next for so cooked for spanish

Improving the content and adding more content! More languages!

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