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Wordcraft: Playing with Sentence Structure

Published: 05 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

We introduce Wordcraft, a new interactive tablet application that allows children to explore sentence structures and their meanings. Wordcraft uses a constructionist design: children manipulate word cards to build sentences, which come to life in a storybook-like animated world to illustrate meaning. Such visual feedback helps children play with parts of speech and understand how they fit together to form sentences. Preliminary studies suggest that children are able to observe and discuss how different sentence constructs result in different meanings.

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References

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Cynthia Chiong and Carly Shuler. 2010. Learning: Is there an app for that. Investigations of young children's usage and learning with mobile devices and apps: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.
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Bob Coyne and Richard Sproat. 2001. WordsEye: an automatic text-to-scene conversion system. ACM SIGGRAPH '01.
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Ali Farhadi, Mohsen Hejrati, Mohammad Amin Sadeghi, Peter Young, Cyrus Rashtchian, Julia Hockenmaier, and David Forsyth. 2010. Every picture tells a story: Generating sentences from images. EECV '10, 15--29.
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Jerry L. Johns. 1970. The Dolch Basic Word ListThen and Now. Journal of Lit Res 3(4), 35--40.
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Girish Kulkarni, Visruth Premraj, Vicente Ordonez, Sagnik Dhar, Siming Li, Yejin Choi, Alexander C. Berg, Tamara Berg. 2013. Babytalk: Understanding and generating simple image descriptions. TPAMI '13, 35(12), 2891--2903.
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Michelle M. Neumann and David L. Neumann. 2014. Touch screen tablets and emergent literacy. Early Childhood Edu Journal 42(4), 231--239.
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Seymour Papert. 1980. Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. Basic Books, Inc.
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Mitchel Resnick, John Maloney, Andrés MonroyHernández, Natalie Rusk, Evelyn Eastmond, Karen Brennan, et al. 2009. Scratch: programming for all. Communications of the ACM 52, 11: 60--67.
[9]
Swapna Somasundaran and Martin Chodorow. 2014. Automated Measures of Specific Vocabulary Knowledge from Constructed Responses ("Use These Words to Write a Sentence Based on this Picture"). 9th NAACL Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, 1--11.
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Luis von Ahn. 2013. Duolingo: learn a language for free while helping to translate the web. IUI 2013, 1--2.
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Lawrence C. Zitnick, Devi Parikh and Lucy Vanderwende. 2013. Learning the visual interpretation of sentences. ICCV 2013, 1681--1688.

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  1. Wordcraft: Playing with Sentence Structure

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI PLAY '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play
    October 2015
    852 pages
    ISBN:9781450334662
    DOI:10.1145/2793107
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Publication History

    Published: 05 October 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. design
    2. education
    3. games
    4. learning
    5. parts of speech

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    CHI PLAY '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 40 of 144 submissions, 28%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 421 of 1,386 submissions, 30%

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