To put it in terms my students would appreciate, the new vocabulary never made it from RAM onto their hard drives. Armed with a hobbyist's knowledge of programming and Macromedia Director authoring software, I set out to design on-line vocabulary study activities and quizzes that would address these challenges. The first goal was to improve the feedback students received while studying. Using Director, I created a simple program that presents students with a definition and a list of words from a given week's list. Students read the definition and then click the word in the list that goes with it.
Feedback is simple and immediate.
If a guess is correct, the computer signals so with the sound of applause and adds a point to the student's score. If a student's guess is wrong, the computer gasps in mock horror and shows the correct answer. In addition, the software tracks the incorrect answers students give, presenting them with a review list at the end of the activity. The activity also includes a help system, allowing students to see how the word is used in a typical sentence, hear it pronounced, and peek at the Japanese translation. To monitor how the students are doing, I designed the activity to record their scores in a server-side database program.