Ingenium: Latin Grammar Puzzle Blocks

Live at TeachMeLatin.com

Engaging Novice Latin Students with Grammatical Logic and Structure

Inspired by Scratch. Built on Blockly.

Publications

Sharon Zhou, Ivy Livingston, Mark Schiefsky, Stuart Shieber, and Krzysztof Z. Gajos. Ingenium: Engaging Novice Students with Latin Grammar. CHI 2016: SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

• This work was published in one of the top computer science venues in the world, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).

• Nearly 50 universities in the U.S. participated in the study, which found that students were much significantly more accurate in their translations and more engaged with the grammar after using Ingenium.

• Watch the on the research.

Sharon Zhou. Engineering Ingenium: Improving Engagement and Accuracy With the Visualization of Latin for Language Learning. Undergraduate Thesis, 2015.

• This work was also published as an undergraduate thesis, representing the first time in Harvard's history that computer science and Classics were combined in a degree as a joint concentration (double major).

• This was done in collaboration with four Harvard professors, two in computer science and two in Classics.

Forking & Modifications

Please fork! :)

For those making modifications, (1) I welcome it wholeheartedly and (2) I give a caveat emptor in advance, and a couple nota bene:

• The code is well-commented in modified areas, but can be unwieldly as I modified the Blockly library source code directly in order to make all the desirable changes.

• Modified code is commented with //*** in Blockly library files.

1. Customizing Practice Sentences

a. Inspect the Dictionary, and Add Words to the Dictionary

The public version enables you to add nouns, adjectives, verbs, prepositions, and adverbs. There are two places in the file POSfactory.js in which you should add your new words.

1. Add the word into the ToolTips object, following its part of speech. This will show when hovering over the block as a dictionary gloss.

2. Find the word's corresponding part of speech under the ToolTips. Add the word and, if applicable, its relevant inflections.

   • Nouns: Add to the NounInflections object.

   • Verbs: Add to the Verbs object. The Expectations object for verbs specify what this verb is "looking for" or "has a gap for", in the Michigan Latin approach, e.g. transitive verbs will expect an accusative direct object, while special intransitive verbs will expect a dative (for the purposes of novice learning, we included the subject for all verbs, though this is not required).

   • Adjectives: Add to the Adjectives object. Include in it the adjective's inflection.

   • Prepositions: Add to the Prepositions object. Include in it the case that it takes.

   • Adverbs: Add to the Adverbs object.

b. Change the Words in the Sentences

Three pages of sentences can be found in /app/latin/sentences, which correspond to the three rendered pages of blocks at TeachMeLatin (they are separated by a click of the Continue button at the bottom of each page).

• These 3 pages are in the folders 0, 1, and 2.
• In each of these folders, please find 5 html files that correspond to the 5 sentences on that page.

Please modify these to include your desired word blocks.

c. Specifying Different Parts of Speech

• Nouns are specified using a declined form first, followed by their lemma, and concluding with the word noun, e.g. agricolae-agricola-noun.
• Verbs are specified with its inflected form, e.g. fugiunt. Optionally, you may include the word clampless, e.g. fugiunt-clampless. This is to specify the shape of the verb. In our research, we explored two designs: one with clamps and one without. We found the clampless form to be more effective and compelled students to think outside of the otherwise strict horizontal word order, though the difference in their efficacy was not significant. Use either that suits your needs.
• The remaining words take on their inflected form without further specification.

2. Changing from English to Another Language

To modify the base language, please follow the steps below.

a. Declensions, plurality, gender

• Modify the ENUMs for POS at the top of the file POSfactory.js, e.g. NOMINATIVE: string_for_nominative_in_target_language.
• If the above modification is insufficient, please also find and replace all instances of nominative, etc. in the lowercase in the file POSfactory.js.

b. "Choose" for blocks

• Modify the string choose to the target language in block.setFieldValue("choose", "dropdown"); in the file Sentence.js.

c. Translations Checker

• Modify possible translations in the function checkTranslation in the file Index.js.
• Sample answers (which students can click to see) can be modified in the function displayAnswer in the file Index.js. You may change these to the empty string, if you wish students are unable to see a sample answer, or you may change these to abbreviated hints that you wish for your students to see instead.

d. Webpage Text Changes

• Modify text in the file index.html.

e. Disable or Change the Initial Modal (Popup)

• To disable the modal, comment out the block of text after the comment Open Instructions on load of first lesson in the file Index.js.
• To modify the modal, modify all html tags with an id prefixed by modal- in the file index.html.
• Scroll down in both files to modify or remove the feedback modal.

Author

Sharon Zhou (@sharonzhou)

License

Apache 2.0 License

Notice

This work was built on Google's Blockly (2013) and Closure (2015) Libraries, and maintains the integrity of the License (both Apache 2.0) that lies therein. Following this License, the modifications herein are documented in the file NOTICE.