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A new version of Times Tables has been approved and is available on the app store. This is a minor update that allows the questions to be shown as either 7×1 or 1×7.
If you would like to see Times Tables in your own language or would like to take part in a beta test, please leave me a message.
I have released an iPhone version of my hiragana and katakana quizes. My intention is to link together the web version of the quizes with the iPhone so that you can keep track of your progress and continue your learning, whether you are on the bus or sitting at your computer. It is called HiraKata Quiz and it can be found on the app store here.
Over the next couple of posts I thought that I would like to discuss the redevelopment of my hiragana and katakana quiz software. This software originally started out as a command-line Perl script, became a PHP web script, before turning into a Ruby on Rails web application. Unfortunately, although the development language changed and possibilities increased, the overall functionality remained very much trapped in the original design. As I have started in other posts, I have plans for my quiz software, but it remains rather static, so perhaps it would be a good idea to talk about user stories as a way of providing clarity and focus.
I tend to prefer to use development tools that simplify the tasks that I have come to find routine, but perhaps more importantly provide me with a fresh and powerful way of looking at new problems that I need to solve. The latest tool to find me is “user stories”:http://rspec.info/documentation/stories.html with “RSpec”:http://rspec.info. Now, I must say that I was already using RSpec to ‘test’ other Ruby on Rails applications and I think that everyone should try and play around with it for a bit, but user stories — in particular the plain-text flavour of them — are what currently occupy my notebook scribbles.
Let me show a somewhat simplistic and incomplete example of a user story:
Story: starting a quiz
As a visitor
I want to start a quiz
So that I can hopefully learn something
Scenario: quiz doesn't exist
Given a quiz named hiragana
When I start another quiz
Then I should see the 404 error page
And I should see a link to the list of quizes
Scenario: quiz does exist
Given a quiz named hiragana
When I start the quiz
Then I should see the quiz
And I should see a question
We have a story with two scenarios: when the quiz exists and when the quiz doesn’t exist. It is not very interesting, but at least we know that the user should see an error page if they try and start a quiz that doesn’t exist, and that they should also see a list of quizes that are available instead. If the quiz does exist then they should see a question.
This might be useful if we want to ensure that the 404 page is shown when the requested quiz doesn’t exist, but it is not very satisfactory to write down and seems a bit pointless. It also doesn’t help us understand what happens when a user starts a quiz.
One of the main thing that I like about plain text user stories is that I can easily scribble them down on a piece of paper. I can focus on describing my goals without worrying about the implementation details and afterwards even use this “pseudotestcode” directly. The plain text user story also is nicely separated from the implementation code that is needed to make it work and because of this, it is easy to fit an understandable and detailed story in a manageable page or two.
I think I will use the following story in my quiz redevelopment and next time I will discuss other stories, and also how to test these stories.
Story: starting a quiz
As a visitor
I want to start a quiz
So that I can hopefully learn something
Scenario: quiz doesn't exist
Given a quiz named hiragana
And a quiz named katakana
When I start another quiz
Then I should see the 404 error page
And I should see a list of quizes
And the list of quizes should have 2 items
Scenario: default configuration
Given a quiz named hiragana
When I start the quiz
Then I should see the quiz
And I should see a question
And I should see the text "Question 1 of 5"
And there should be 3 textboxes
Scenario: 10 questions
Given a quiz named hiragana
And the quiz has been configured for 10 questions
When I start the quiz
Then I should see the quiz
And I should see "Question 1 of 10"
Scenario: 5 hiragana per question
Given a quiz named hiragana
And the quiz has been configured for 5 hiragana
When I start the quiz
Then I should see the quiz
And there should be 5 textboxes
UPDATE: well the old quiz should be back online so if there are any problems please let me know! I am going to start documenting my work on the new version of the quizes so let’s see how it goes.
Hello, I am sorry to say that I am putting the quizes temporarily offline. The reason being that they are in definite need of changes and I haven’t updated the code for a long time; mainly because it was too awkward deploying new versions. I am starting to take the steps to simplify the whole process, but it may take a couple of days to return.
As I want to go to Japan this summer I think this will be a good opportunity for me to sort out the quizes and make them more useful for me which in turn should be more useful for you!
I think it is now time to discuss the quiz poll results. Thank you everyone who spent some time voting and especially those that left comments. The current results can be seen in the graph below:
The comments that I received were as follows:
Some notes from the graph and comments:
Real words I believe have been requested by people that have already learnt quite a bit of the hiragana or katakana and now want to be tested on words that are actually useful. When I try to learn things I tend to focus on one group at a time so I think it would be difficult to find a list of words that only contain ka, ki, ku, ke, ko for example.
Repetitive questions could either be the result of selecting too few character groups so that the questions are always formed from the same 10 characters, or instead the same characters are shown regardless of how many character groups are selected.
Progress tracking and automatically adapting questions can allow the software to automatically suggest which groups/characters need testing and when. However, if the on-screen results are not clear then there is the risk that the users are not aware of their progress and perhaps even the mistakes they have made and need to concentrate on.
I will post on this again later, but if people do have any more comments or want to open up a discussion then please use the comment form below.
I have decided that it my hiragana and katakana quiz are in need of some attention, but I don’t know where to start. What better way than a little survey? Do you think that it keeps asking you the same character over and over again (even though you have selected lots of rows) or perhaps it should realise that you have learnt a specific character and that there is no point asking you it again (not today anyway)? I am sure that the following choices don’t cover all cases so please leave a comment instead.
Thank you!
Update: thank you for the votes that have been made so far. In September I will post the results and my plans.
I have updated the hiragana and katakana quizes and I hope they are now easier to use.
I have split the text box on the question page into multiple text boxes so that there is one for each hiragana or katakana. I hope that this is clearer than the previous version where one had to insert a space between each romanji.
*Click on image*The _results page_ might actually be useful now as it shows you not only how many times you got a katakana or hiragana correct, but also how many times you got the row of characters (e.g. the ‘k’ row with ka, ki, ku, ke, ko) right so you can decide to reconfigure the quiz and choose some different rows.As always, the quizes can be found at “quiz.kumo.it”:http://quiz.kumo.it so enjoy! If there are any problems, or you don’t like how I have changed something, or you have new ideas please write to me on my “guestbook”:/guestbook or at “kumo@kumo.it”:mailto:kumo@kumo.it
Well I was able to sort out the problems that I described in my previous post and so now the new katakana quiz can be found here!
