Wordsplash

Website (desktop only) GitHub

The Idea

As a Spanish learner, I thought it'd be fun to make myself a learning tool. I've come to realize that no matter what level I'm at, there’s never a shortage of new vocabulary to learn. I wasn’t aiming to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to make a flashcards app that offered something a little different than what's on the market. And that would be to allow the user to pick their favorite photos among a given set of photos. There's no science to back this up, but I wondered if by allowing the user to choose the photos that resonated with them most, that could aid in memory retention.

Tech Stack

Rails

Javascript

Bootstrap

MS Translator

Bing Images

Heroku

Coding & Challenges

I broke the project into smaller pieces and worked on translation first. I initially used an API by Yandex as it was free and simple to set up. But it was no longer free after several months so I switched to Microsoft’s Translation API. Both were actually pretty straightforward to set up. I then moved on to the photos feature and researched different search engine APIs. I ended up choosing Microsoft as it too was free. The first 10 images for any word that a user looked up would be requested. With a bit of javascript, the user would then choose whichever photos they liked, and those would in turn be created into flashcards via a database save of the image urls. When the user plays their flashcards, they would be played at random and the photo would be random as well.

There wasn’t anything particularly complicated about this project, but I became much more comfortable working with different APIs and JSON. I also got some good practice with Javascript and CSS animations. In the future, I'd like to add a feature that allows users to upload their own photos.