Similar projects
USA
Media & Education
Mobile & Web
Ongoing
An organization steadily creating and advancing the premier dictionary/thesaurus learning resource for students, schools, and partners. Yes, it’s about vocabulary. Users of this resource range in age from kindergarten pupils to college students and beyond. The educational content is rich and the strategies innovative—information and instruction are conveyed in an engaging and effective manner at every user level. Audio, animated illustrations, and games are in the mix. Multiple languages are supported.
We have worked for nearly twenty years with this client and have successfully provided the technical know-how for realizing this extraordinary language-learning experience. Starting as a desktop application, we helped transition it into a multi-faceted learning resource available both on the web and mobile devices (Android and iOS phones and tablets).
The challenge here is threefold: (1) keep evolving the product into a ‘smarter’ learning experience; (2) develop tools that enable our client to continue evolving it; and (3) develop tools and resources that engage other educational partners.
President of The Wordsmyth Organization
“The key to any project challenge lies within effective management and innovative approach. My experience with Envion Software is that they deliver both, the state-of-the-art solutions and productive management of the developing process. They have been resolving many challenges while completing our project to meet our expectations. Well, that is hard to imagine consistent excellence, but my experience with Envion Software has persuaded me it is possible.”
The chief objective of this learning product is to promote vocabulary skills and general literacy. Consequently, there is not a solution per se—rather, the solution is an ongoing commitment to research and development in this learning area (each and every year) and to applying leading-edge language and technical skills.
Migrating from a desktop experience to an online web experience was a first step. The web platform became not only a living site (amenable to little tweaks and big innovations), but also a new model of learning vocabulary. And today, by porting this learning approach to Android and iOS gadgets, the paradigm is extended to the most common devices in the land.
To get to this point and beyond, we developed:
a workbench for our client’s lexicographers with the following capabilities (to name a few):
a collaborative environment allowing geographically dispersed editors to work together;
an inheritance feature that allows each dictionary entry to be multi-purposed for each literacy level. This is achieved by preserving common content and selectively editing content that needs to be adjusted;
a specialized toolkit that assists editors in authoring entries with features such as finding in-context references (to a word in question) and highlighting vocabulary outside the intended literacy level.
more and more games to further engage learner interest;
a realistic implementation of a teacher-learner classroom experience.
Our client continues to have a leading educational package in the marketplace. User registrations and subscriptions increase year-by-year. The content and features across the platforms are more flexibly created/edited through technical solutions such as the lexicographer’s workbench, while the availability of our client’s resources for their partners was made possible through the web services we put in place.