Will Americans Really Learn Chinese?

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/will-americans-really-learn-chinese/

Website Updated, inventure round 2

The website has a new front-page and a slew of new features. You can now make, share, and search for custom decks. Also, we redid the way you search for and find games. It should be fairly solid, but if you notice any bugs, please - please - tell us about them so we can fix them! Also, unfortunately we had to redo the way decks are structured so any self-study data that may have been accumulated was lost.

Also, today was the second round of the inventure prize. It went poorly - I'll say that much. We won't hear back the results of this round for a few days but there's a strong chance we won't make it simply due to giving a terrible presentation. Mindrival is such a strong project that it will truly be a shame to have blown it because of a 3 minute presentation. Regardless of the outcome, however, we will continue to put everything we have into making mindrival a successful tool.

Rising College Costs: A Federal Role?

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/rising-college-costs-a-federal-role/

Rosetta Stones competitor, "Tell me more"

http://www.tellmemore.com/

Flashcard Machine

http://www.flashcardmachine.com/

Administration Outlines Proposed Changes to ‘No Child’ Law

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/education/02child.html

The Web Way to learn a language

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/technology/personaltech/28basics.html?ref=technology

Nike + Coach

http://nikerunning.nike.com/nikeos/p/nikeplus/en_US/plus/#//coach/

"How Nike Plus Works"

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/edwardbaig/2006-07-19-nike-ipod_x.htm

Inventure Round 1 Complete

The first round of the GT Inventure Prize is over, and the results are in: mindrival made it to the next round!

The format of the first round was a poster presentation in a room in the gym. Each project set up a poster and talked about their idea with the judges who walked from table to table. The event lasted about 2 hours, after which time we had talked with about 10 judges.

Overall, I thought it went very well, and a lot of the judges had good ideas to offer us. One idea in particular I thought was very cool was using mindrival as a way for different schools to interact with each other. For example, a Spanish class in the US could play with an English class in Mexico.

The next round is in 2 weeks, on February 4. Before that time we hope to have user-made decks up and running as well as having the application fully translated into Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese. If there's time we'll try to have some of the language classes at Georgia Tech give the program a test run as well.

Inventure Prize, First Round

Later today we will be competing in the preliminary round of the GT Inventure Prize competition with mindrival.net! There are 49 entries, and after today only 20 will remain. Does mindrival have what it takes?

What's your High Score?

By popular demand scoring has been completely redone in mindrival. Now, instead of just have a 40 second timer and getting as many as you can, you have 100 seconds but you the faster you answer a question the more points you get.

A lot of people complained that 40 seconds wasn't long enough, and it sucks when you run out of time before you got a chance to try your hand at every question.

So, now you get a max of 100 points for answering each question - the longer it takes you the fewer points you receive. In theory if you instantly answered every question you could get 1000 points.

After trying this out myself I found this scoring method is actually a lot more fun for another reason too: It gives you something to try to beat. Before, if you got all 10 questions right that was about as good as you could possibly get. Now, though, even if you get all 10 right you can still do better next time if you answer them faster. I'm hoping to add a "high score" for each person, and maybe even add a ranking of all players by deck. Do really well and maybe you can be the one everyone tries to beat!

Self-Study Mode

Have you ever used to excellent flashcard program anki? Spaced-repetition flashcards, like anki, is now integrated into mindrival! Now, when you play a game, you can record how well you know each word you saw and study them in "self-study mode". You'll need to make a full user account to do this though - sorry guests!

Friends Lists Added

Now you can keep track of all the cool people you meet in mindrival!

To add a friend, type /addfriend . Then, to see what all your friends are up to type /friends. Should you have a falling out, you can get rid of a friend by typing /removefriend .

It's basic, I know, but hopefully in the next few days this will be extended so you will be notified about what your friends are up to without having to type /friends. For example, if a friend logs on, or joins a game, you'll be notified so you can say hi or play with them too.

Competitive Learning: Introducing Mindrival

Why do people enjoy trivial pursuit but hate studying? Why will people eagerly scream answers at the TV when watching Jeopardy when they would hate studying for a test on the same material? Why is Scrabble so much fun when studying spelling is so boring? The answer, of course, is competition. People are naturally competitive and enjoy competing with each other, even when they would not enjoy the subject of the competition otherwise.

Now, imagine taking this concept and using it to make learning fun. This is not a new idea - almost every school teacher has played some form of jeopardy with their class as a learning experience. However, with the rapid development of the internet and browser-based software in recent years this concept of competitive learning can now be applied on a much larger and more general scale.

Enter mindrival: mindrival is a browser-based framework for competitively studying foreign-language vocabulary. Users compare their knowledge in real-time against their friends and other users studying the same material. By making the studying of this language vocabulary competitive, the act of studying becomes more enjoyable and the user is less likely to stop their studying due to boredom or lack of motivation. Furthermore, they will be able to meet and chat with other like-minded individuals and learn from each other.

While this system can ultimately be used to competitively study any subject, foreign language vocabulary was chosen as a starting point due to the size of the community of people studying it, and the availability of massive vocab lists which we can import into our system. Furthermore, foreign-language learning lends itself easily to internationalization. A Chinese-English vocabulary game is just as useful for a Chinese-speaker learning English as for an English-speaker learning Chinese. While the market for English-speakers learning other languages is large, the reverse is enormous. The majority of the world's students are learning English as a second language.

So who is behind mindrival? Mindrival is being developed by 4 students from Georgia Tech and it is an entrant in the inventure prize at Georgia Tech. If you have any good ideas to contribute, or if you find any problems we'd love to hear your feedback!