Flash Card Study Aid – A Summer Project
I was approached by two college students earlier this year about the possibility of me implementing a study aid program for them as a part of a national Young Entrepreneur contest held in May 2008. The implementation was a success and the project won first prize. I implemented a second, improved version of the program (called Recall 2008) for the follow-up contest, this time an international competition that took place in Sweden on the 24th – 27th of July, called “Junior Achievement-Young Enterprise”. Here’s a link to the project’s web-page.
The program, Recall 2008, simulates Q&A flash cards where people write a question on a card, the answer on the other side and then go through the stack of questions they have to try to remember the answers to the questions. The most innovative factor in the program is the way it goes through the questions. There are 5 methods of learning:
- The study mode – asks you the questions you have until you’ve gotten a grade of 80% and automatically focuses more on questions you’ve been having problems with.
- Exam – goes through the questions one after the other and gives you a grade in the end, also offers afterwards to go through the questions you were unable to answer.
- Recall – Goes through the questions until you’ve had enough.
- Timed Recall – you set a timer and answer as many questions as you can in that time.
The most difficult part of this program was actually implementing a passable word processing module for the flash card entry section. All I needed were the basic word processing tools. The cheapest one I found was from Aspose at ~250 Euros, but that one couldn’t even do underlined text and looked rather dated. In the end I just wrote my own word editor using the standard RichTextBox control as a base. The program also includes my first attempt at a shareware protection implementation as well as key generation and unlocking mechanisms.
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