(no subject)

[jack]

Vocabulary quiz: Free Rice

This vocabulary test is really great? Freerice, unlike a traditional vocab test, has a large dictionary and measures hardness of words by how many people get them right this means it's amazingly good at finding words right on the boundary of what you know, ones you've heard used somewhere, but can't quite place, rather than either being words anyone knows, or common long words, or words so obscure only people in specialist fields know them, or words simply famous for being obscure.

This gives an unfair advantage in the quiz to people who know words from having heard them used in books and conversations with articulate people, rather than people who read dictionaries for fun :) So it suits me.

The questions are tailored to your responses, after a few minutes finding their own level at a category of words you know 3/4 of. I could play all day.

Also, it (apparently) raises advertising revue, from which it donates to charity.

This morning, I got up to level 45/50 before starting getting them wrong. What do you get?

Geography quiz: Statetris

There've been many geography quizes going round that ask if you can place countries in europe, but this is so cool because it's Tetris!

Each country falls from the north, and you have to manoeuvre it into position. There's some clues, for instance, it has to be one of the ones on the bottom.

In the easy level the country is labelled. In intermediate, it isn't. In hard, it needs to be rotated to the correct orientation.

It's really satisfying because when you've completed all-but-one, the last country is Russia, which is really big, and really obvious, so it's such a release to be able to plonk it down with a thunderous crash to finish the level.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/vitriol_/]

I spent about ten minutes playing FreeRice this morning, and leveled out around 44ish (though there were some lucky guesses in that). It's endorsed by the WFP, so it's presumably relatively legit when it comes to its donations.

[rjw76]

I am feeling insufferably smug because I made it to level 50 within 15 minutes :D

This is mostly due to my knowledge of Latin and Greek rather than having actually seen the words before, though.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Yay, FreeRice.

It is very impressive in that the level of challenge is "just right".

I can get up to 50 with great difficulty, mostly based on etymological knowledge and lucky guesswork.

It does repeat itself after a while, and sometimes I can remember what the answer was last time.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

I played this for a while the other week. I got it up to 50 and mostly kept it there, but after about 2000 grains of rice the words began repeating :-(

[stephdairy.livejournal.com]

Your links are broken due to a lack of http://.

(S)

[liv]

Freerice is good fun. I usually hover around 48 with occasional surges to 49 or 50. I do like the balance, particularly the fact that the hard words are not all Latinate technical terms (and thus transparent to someone with a classical education but utterly obscure to everyone else). It does repeat a bit after a while, but otherwise it's very well thought out.

[d37373.livejournal.com]

Some of the 'hard' ones seem easy to me, and some of the easy ones hard. Given how quickly a well-designed feedback system can stabalize, I'd guess that's because my background knowledge is different from the average user.

What would be really interesting is to do proximity/clustering analysis on the data and see if any significant groups come up. You could also do a Netflix Prize style calculation to predict the dificulty more accurately.

And it's fun, and educational :)