Copyright: (c) 1997 Johannes Unnewehr


Puzzle Short Instruction

Drag the items to the coloured puzzle pieces.

How to do it:

1	Start Puzzle as described in the Basics section. The game automatically opens four lessons and spreads a mixed set of vocabulary items on the screen. If you want to get more or less items, please change the number via the menu File, Options. Puzzle also shows four puzzle pieces, which are labeled with the titles and the subjects of the four lessons.

2	Assign each item to it’s lesson using the mouse by dragging it to the correct puzzle piece. If an item is contained in more than one lesson, there may be more than one solutions. It also may occure, that an item is alredy placed on the correct piece. If so, you need not drag it, just click it.

3	After dropping the item to the correct puzzle piece, the translation is shown for a while. Use the menu File, Options to adjust the duration of the while. Try to learn the translation. The translation is switched off then, and the item shows up in a smaller font to signal to you, that it’s done. If you drop an item to a wrong puzzle piece, it won’t change. You just get an acustic feedback. Try another puzzle piece, than.

4	By assigning more and more items to the correct puzzle pieces, you build word fields, which are pretty to learn. If you forgot a translation, just click the item to see the translation again.

5	When you finish the lesson, you get a highscore entry. If you are already represented in the highscore you can add the number of the trained words to your score.

6	After showing the highscore Puzzle automatically starts the next game. You can change the lessons or exit any time. Opening a new lesson makes the open lessons shift, so that the oldest lesson is discarded. To open a lesson use the menu option Open, the Lessons a la Carte function or drag & drop lessons to the game.

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See Also

Basics

Making your own Lesson

Lessons a la Carte


Lesson Market

The lesson market is a free service you can use any time you want. Exchange lessons with language learning people all over the world!

How to do it:

1	Create a new lesson for any two languages you want. Your lesson has to meet the following requirements:

It has a subject.

It contains 20-50 entries.

It’s not taken from another vocab program.

2	Send the lesson via email.

3	Doing so, you’ll give the copyright to me, and i’ll put the lesson to the market.

4	Via email, you’ll get all the lessons from the market immediately.

You can use Wordshop, vokki or any texteditor to create your lessons.

If you don’t want to contribute an own lesson, buy the market via internet at the software shop of the  Akademische Software Kooperation (ASK): http://www.ask.uni-karlsruhe.de.

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See Also

Making your own Lessons


Products

vokki bundles three fascinating vocab games with an efficient vocab trainer and a lesson editor. The very special: You can play together with your friends and vokki automatically adapts to the knowledge of each of you. vokki is the vocab programs Mercedes Benz (Windows 3.x, 95 und NT).

WordTris is a language learning word game, where vocabulary items pile up to the top (Windows 95 und NT).

Category is a vocab game, where you assign the vocabulary items to different categories (Windows 95 und NT).

Puzzle makes you form word fields by dragging the items on coloured puzzle pieces (Windows 95 und NT).

Memory with Words gives you the task of finding a translation for every word by uncovering related cards (Windows 95 und NT).

Word Invader interprets classic action games like the notorious Space Invader for the language learning. Save the universe and repel attacking words with proper translations (Windows 95 und NT).

Choice is a fast multiple-choice test for your vocabulary, very good as a last check before your examination. And: Choice is Freeware (Windows 95 und NT).

Did you learn all the delivered lessons? Are you creating your own lessons? You’re not the only one. Use the Lesson Market and exchange lessons with language learning people all over the world!

Wordshop is a lesson editor for a simple creating, editing, combining and converting of lessons (Windows 95 und NT).

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See Also

Order Form

Sources


Sources

Switch your shareware version into a licensed version. You can use the online order service or simply send information corresponding to the order form via email. In return you get a license number, which is valid for the next updates too. Online ordering will take a few days only, and no shipping is required.

Online Order Service: http://www.comports.com/LanguageLearning/download.htm

Email Service: jounne@gmx.net

Use the order form for postal orders. Please check your address to give the product a chance to reach you. Postal orders will take about 3-6 weeks. Shipping is required.

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See Also

Order Form

Addresses


Order Form
Order Form (valid until 31.12.1999; print out - feed in - send off)

Mr

Johannes Unnewehr
Postfach 10 57 48
D-69047 Heidelberg

Hereby I want to order

Article	|	Copies |	Total |

|	|	|

Single Licenses	|	|	 |

|	|	|

vokki english 	$ 25.00 |	|	 |

vokki spanish	$ 25.00 |	|	 |

vokki euro (engl., franz., ital., span., germ.)	$ 25.00 |	|	 |

Foreign Language Game Collection	$ 40.00 |	|	 |

(Category, Choice, Memory, Puzzle, Word Invader,	|	|	|

WordTris, Wordshop)	|	|	|

|	|	|

Class-Room Licenses (for 20 user)	|	|	 |

|	|	|

vokki (english, spanish plus euro)	$ 200.00 |	|	 |

Foreign Language Game Collection	$ 300.00 |	|	 |

|	|	|

School Licenses (unlimited user in a school) 	|	|	 |

|	|	|

vokki (english, spanish plus euro)	$ 350.00 |	|	 |

Foreign Language Game Collection	$ 500.00 |	|	 |

|	|	|

Shipping	$ 8.00 |	1|	$ 8.00 |

------------------

Sum incl. MwSt.

==========

School:	__________________________________

Name:	__________________________________

Street:	__________________________________

Zip Code, City:	__________________________________

Country:	__________________________________

email:	__________________________________

O	I’ve sent a check	O	I payed to your account

______________,	______	___________________	_____________________

City	Date	Signature	Stamp

Johannes Unnewehr	-	Postbank Karlsruhe	-	BLZ 660 100 75	-	Konto 3379 83-751


License
License Agreement

You as a user of this software and the author agree to keep the following determinations:

Validity of the license

You are authorized to install and to use this software on one computer. Additional licenses are required for use on more computers, the number of the users mustn't exceed the number of the licenses in a net. Shareware versions of this software can be tested for 30 days, after 30 days the license is withdrawn.

Protection of the software

This software is owned by the author and is protected by copyright laws, international treaty provisions and all other applicable national laws.

Changes of the software and the accompanying material are not allowed, especially you may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software.

The Software is freely distributable, but has to be complete and unchanged. For CD-ROM, it may be distributed in installed form without changes after the installation. It is strongly prohibited to distribute the software together with a license number.

You agree to use no license number of others. You also agree to keep your own license number private and to take care that nobody can find out your number. You may transfer your rights under this license agreement on a permanent basis by communicating the address of the new owner to the author and committing to stop using your license number.

Limited warranty

The software is supplied as it is. The author disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, including, without limitation, the warranties of merchantability and of fitness for any purpose. The author assumes no liability for damages, direct or consequential, which may result from the use of the software.

Registration

A registration gives you the advantage of getting news and privileged update offers.


Feedback
Suggestions for Improvement

Have you found a fault? Are you missing a function or would you make something a little differently or better? Do you like something and do you want it to be kept?

Your suggestions are welcome. Please send a letter or an email to me.


Contents
Puzzle Help

Please click the underlined text to see a specific topic. Use the F1 key to learn about the help system.

General

About Puzzle

Products

Ordering

License

Instructions

Basics

How to play

Knowledge & Strategy

Lessons a la Carte

Making your own Lessons

Recommendations

Lesson Market


About
About Puzzle

Puzzle is a vocabulary game, where you form word fields by dragging the vocabulary items on coloured puzzle pieces. The idea behind Puzzle is increasing learning results by clustering, a well known mnemonics in psychology.

© 1997

Johannes Unnewehr

Postfach 10 57 48

69047 Heidelberg

Germany

jounne@gmx.net

Foreign Language Learning Homepage:

http://www.comports.com/LanguageHome

Beta Testing and Translation:

Bjarte Alnes, Eike Brechlin, Angelo Carollo, Wieland Große, Udo Herkommer, Dr. Rolf Jucker, Joergen Larsen, Leif Larsson, Pilar Manzone, Melchor Marín, Esther Monzo, Jim Roberts, Christian Schendera, Franz Josef Wallner

Versions:

1.3: knowledge assessment, adaptivity, user files, advanced options

1.2: mix lessons, drag & drop lessons

1.1: fonts, multi language user Interface

1.0: first version

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See Also

Products


Lessons à la Carte
Mix your Lessons à la Carte

The Lessons à la Carte function allows learning more than one lesson at the same time. You set up a list of lessons by adding or removing lessons as you like. When you go learning, the vocabulary items are drawn at random from all the lessons on the list.

The example shows three lessons on the lesson list, where two have *.vok format and “Feeling.txt” has vocabulary book format. As you can see, it’s no problem to have lessons of different format on the list. It is also possible, although not always useful, to have lessons with different languages on the list. Do it as you like.

How to do it:

1	Use the menu Game, option Mix... to open the Lessons à la Carte window.

2	Drag and drop the lessons you like to the list or use the Add button to add lessons.

3	To remove lessons you can select one or more lessons at once and click the Remove button. Selection works in the File column only.

4	If the list is okay, press the OK button, and that’s all. The game will start automatically.

5	You can interrupt the game whenever you want, and change the lesson list again.

Tips

•	If you mix a big lesson with a small lesson, you probably will be asked more vocabulary items from the big lesson.

•	Menu Game, option Open... discards the lesson list when opening new lessons. You can open more than one lesson at once.

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See also

Lesson Market


Making your own Lessons
Making your own Lesson

This program is distributed with lessons for Englisch, French, Spanish, Italian and German in different combinations. Use the lesson editor Wordshop to combine the languages you want to learn. For example, combine a lesson English-German and a lesson German-Spanish to get a new lesson English-Spanish. Wordshop also is a nice tool to create and edit lessons.

You can use this program with two lesson file formats: the vokki-format (*.vok) and the vocab book format (*.txt). Vocab books are created with any texteditor. They are just containing entries like:

For Category and Puzzle the lessons have to be provided with title and subject. Begin each lesson with entries similar to the following:

Ti: Feeling

Th: mixed Feelings

To learn Russian, Greek, Korean and other languages with different fonts it is recommended to use the Rich-Text-Format (*.rtf) for your vocab book. Most Microsoft-Programs and Wordshop are working with this format. Add an entry for the fonts (left font - right font):

Fo: Arial_clRed_10_[Bold, Italic]  -  Cyrillic_clBlue_11_[]

Some examples are given in the ...\Lesson\Vocabook directory.

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See also

Lesson Market


Basics

Basically, a user (that’s you) learns a lesson playing a game. The User is represented by a user file (*.usr), the lesson is stored in a lesson file (*.vok or *.txt) and the game is an executable program (*.exe). Let’s say user Jo wants to learn the lesson Feeling playing WordTris. There are four ways to do it:

Click the icon

The simplest way to start learning is: Just double click the icon.

•	If you click a user, the last game the user played before will come up and load the lessons he was learning.

•	Clicking the lesson will invoke the lesson editor giving you everything to edit the lesson.

•	Clicking the game will start this game initiated with the settings from the user who at last played the game. It will also automatically load the lessons he was learning.

Open the context menu

Another way would be right clicking the user or the lesson and choosing the context menu.

•	This way you can play any game with your user data, which will cause the game to open your most recently used lessons.

•	Or you can learn the lesson with any game, where the game automatically opens the most recently playing user:

Drag & drop files to the game

Third way is Drag & Drop files to the game. If the game is not already running, it will be started.

•	You can drop more than one lesson to the game. They will be mixed, so that you can learn all these lessons at the same time. If you drop with pressed CTRL key, the dropped lessons will be added to the lessons already opened. Otherwise the old lessons will be discarded.

•	You can drop only one user to a game. It will automatically switch to the lessons the user learned before.

Use the file dialog

Finally there is the traditional way of using the Open file dialog: Choose menu Game/User/Open or Game/Lesson/Open and choose files. It will work the same as the Drag & Drop above.

Tips

•	Drag and drop your user file to the desktop window and use its context menu for the easiest going.

•	Press the CTRL key while opening lessons to prevent the old lessons from being discarded.

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See also

User files

Lesson files

Lessons à la Carte


Knowledge View
The Knowledge View

The Knowledge View shows how the program assesses your knowledge about the opened lessons and enables you to choose a strategy, which is used to draw the questions from the lessons. You can decide to learn the harder vocabulary items for instance, which is more effective than giving the same attention to all items.

The image shows a list of all vocabulary items from the opened lessons. The items are provided with a symbol at their left site and with a score at the right. The score is calculated automatically each time you answer a question. Thereby the difficulty of the question is considered. For a text input question a correct answer has more weight than a wrong answer. For multiple choice it is vice versa, the program derives more information from a wrong answer than from a correct one. In a similar way time limits and other special cases are taken into account.

At the beginning of a stage, the program marks the questions to be asked. You can decide which strategy the program should use to find the best questions for you:

Maximum Adaptivity

Maximum Adaptivity is a very effective learning strategy, because it always gives you the hardest questions from the lesson. Calculating new scores for a vocabulary item after each answer the program keeps track of your learning advances. For the next stage the updated information is used to retrieve the hardest items again. Depending on your advance these can be the same or other items.

Half-Split

The Half-Split strategy draws at random questions from the harder half of the lesson. It is still very effective, but with more variation than the first strategy. A Half-Split strategy for knowledge assessment has been proposed by Falmagne & Doignon (1988) and has been realized by the Heidelberg University’s Knowledge Structures research project in 1992. For foreign language learning Half-Split has been first implemented with the vocabulary trainer vokki in 1995.

Walk-Through

Walk-Through takes at random one item after another until each is asked one time. You can compare it with using a paper vocabulary book. It is very uneffective, because you waste much time with words you already know. The only reason this strategy has been implemented is because most people know it from other programs or from vocabulary books and somehow got used to use it.

When finishing the program your knowledge state is automatically stored to your user file and will be loaded when you start learning the next time.

Tips (for kids only)

•	If you are controlled by parents or teachers, you have the license to cheat. The games are for learning with fun, not for control. Use the cheat button to show a better knowledge state.

•	Use the cheat button in emergency only, because the program cannot adapt to your knowledge after cheating. I suggest saving an uncheated version of your user file for secret learning.

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See also

User files


Falmagne & Doignon (1985)
Falmagne & Doignon (1988). A markovian procedure for assessing the state of a system. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 32 (3), 232-258.


Lukas & Albert (1993)
Lukas, J., & Albert, D. (1993). Knowledge assessment based on skill assignment and psychological task analyses. In G. Strube & K.F.Wender (Eds.), The cognitive psychology of knowledge, 139-159. Amsterdam: Elsevier.


User Files

The user file contains information about:

•	your settings, e.g. weather the sound is on, how many questions you choosed, where the game is located on the screen and which lessons you opened

•	your knowledge state. The game assesses your knowledge about the vocabulary and adapts to that knowledge by asking you what you didn’t know and leaving out what you’re already familiar with. The information about your knowledge is stored to you user file, so that you can reload it the next time you learn. You can use it even with another game.

How to use your user file:

•	Double click it.

•	Open it’s context menu.

•	Drag & drop it to a game.

•	Open it in a game via the menu Game/Open.

•	Edit it with any text editor (e.g. Notepad).

Tips

Drag you user file to the desktop window.

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See also

Basics

Knowledge View