LEx

In grammar, a part of speech or lexical class, is a linguistic category of words.  These concepts are tough to teach and often difficult for students to apply, but without basic lexical understand sentence structure and grammar cannot be taught.  

Development 

LEX, originally Rap* was a collaboration between Marie Ferro (Graphics), Caroline Pitner and myself (Concept/Code) for our learning products studio. Rap* was later rebuilt as LEX by Rafe Goldberg (Graphics) and myself (Code). 

First Visit

With the songs playing on a computer in the background, the students would drag the words magnets to the appropriate part of speech.  To help them out, the students were given “cheat sheets” describing the parts of speech. This was an experiment to examine how the kids reacted to the drag and drop interface of we planned to implement in the app. 

Second Visit

On this visit we brought two iPads with us, each loaded with a prototype of Rap*. This version contained only one song, Moment 4 Life by Nicki Minaj, and required the students to identify only three basic parts of speech and utilizing the drag and drop motions of the previous device.

Final Visit

On this visit we brought with us a refined version of the app. We improved the scoring system so that it would require the students to correctly place at least 60% of the words in order to advance to the next level.