Vast Vocab

Vocabulary training at your fingertips

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Inspiration

Learning is a constant aspect of life and Vast Vocab helps with just that. Communication is important for everyone around the world, and is done daily, so I decided to come up with a site that teaches the user words to improve their vocabulary.

What it does

Vast Vocab is meant for anyone, from children to the elderly, and teaches them different vocabulary. Currently, the set of words that were chosen are medical terminology that is essential to learn for medical students and doctors. Vast Vocab will generate a new word every time you click the "generate new word" button.

How we built it

I developed Vast Vocab using Python and Flask for the back-end server component. Python was used to make API calls and to manipulate Json libraries. HTML and Css was used for the front-end. I also used domain.com to create a website to advertise our product, which can be viewed here: (www.vastvocab.com). Currently it does not run off a website, but instead on one's computer via Flask.

Challenges we ran into

Taking on this project by myself, there were many challenges that I ran into. Considering that in the past, I had not had any experience with back-end development, this was a daunting task. I had issues installing the PIP extension for Flask, which took up quite a few hours. There was a constant error message returned even after properly installing PIP. I eventually got around this issue by using a different editor (pycharm), which was able to install PIP easily.

Another challenge that arose was integrating the returned Json data into Flask and displaying it on the screen. After some help with student and sponsor mentorship, they resolved some of my issues, while also providing me with useful information as to what I should do next, to achieve my end goal.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

Considering that this was my first time using Flask and developing in the back-end, I am quite proud that I was able to eventually finish a working project, that successfully used API calls to retrieve the definition of randomly generated words. At times within the hackathon, I was tempted to give up, but I decided not to and try my very best.

What we learned

I learned some fundamentals regarding back-end development, and how Flask uses pointers to call functions within Python when a certain route is triggered. This being my first time working alone at a Hackathon, I've learnt that having teammates can be very helpful when distributing the workload, as it is a lot for one person.

What's next for Vast Vocab

Future steps for Vast Vocab include: creating a category drop down, which has various categories that the user can choose from, expanding the vocabulary library so that there are more words for the user to learn, implementing a search bar for user to type in a word and get the definition, and lastly having more information returned from the Json file, like the frequency, or the pronunciation (a .mp3 file).

To conclude, it is very useful for people of all ages to expand their vocabulary, not only to gain knowledge, but also maintain an active mind.

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