Show HN: Practice a second language by solving image-based puzzles | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Practice a second language by solving image-based puzzles

alkutshina.netlify.app

This was actually fun. I played a few puzzles, it’ll be cool if the problems go beyond just following instructions.

Thanks! Any ideas for puzzles you'd enjoy solving? Love the idea, but it can't think of many actual puzzles that make sense in this context...

“Dale el cuchillo a la familia” oh man this had me laughing

Nice. I'd try to avoid the puzzles with only two options, in (most?) of them it's obvious hat yu must pick the small object and drag it into the big one. Like

[chair] [room]

It make sense to move to chair into the room, bot not in the other direction.

Thanks for the feedback. I definitely agree, difficulty progression needs work :)

Something easy like the number of images may be good enough for a first version. Are you randomizing the questions? Perhaps start with some easy examples with 1 object and 1 place, then 2 small objects and 1 place, then 2 small objects and 2 places, then 3 small objects and 2 places, ... Or something like that. (I remember a few other options like "cut the apple", that has no "places" so take my recomendation only as a rought idea.)

Yes, solid ideas, I was thinking along similar lines.

There are two possible meta approaches for this:

a) hard-code the whole progression, which is tedious and not very adaptive to the learner's level

b) use algorithmic exercise/question selection. Then, suddenly, degrees of freedom explode: You had 5 exercises in a row with 6 images, maybe you'd want something easier. It was a long time since we practiced anything with "apple". But "cutting" was just practiced, it would be boring to bring it up again. So here is a set with all possible "apple" questions in the database. Some include words not yet practiced. Which one do we pick? And so on. It's a fascinating problem, far more complex than I anticipated. And if you use simple shortcuts, you quickly end in very boring loops :)

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