Education/Newsletter/June 2016/Argostoli Evening School students and a Wikitherapy participant turn Wiktionary project into Android app

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By Saintfevrier

Snippet: 10th Grade school project on Greek Wiktionary is enhanced by a Wikitherapy participant and being developed into an app by this year's 10th Grade

A sneak preview of the quiz developed in AppInventor by the Argostoli Evening School using words from the "Kefalonian dialect" category on Greek Wiktionary.

If you read the December 2015 newsletter, you may remember the Argostoli Evening School's Wiktionary project on the local Kefalonian dialect. The school's work was warmly received at the Conference on Informatics in Education 2015 in Piraeus, Greece. This year we decided to take the idea a step farther by building a multiple-choice quiz with MIT App Inventor, inviting users to test their knowledge on the dialect used by the locals in Kefalonia. Using a category of Greek Wiktionary words developed last year, the students devised 20 multiple-choice questions with three choices each. Then the students designed the interface and programmed the command blocks in App Inventor 2. The ai2 environment was developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and released internationally under Creative Commons licensing.

User Jim Vallianos displays his translation lists at Argostoli Day Center

Jim Vallianos is a participant in the Wikitherapy program at the Argostoli Mental Health Day Center for Adults. Over the past 5 months, he has made over 500 edits to Greek Wiktionary, mainly in the form of translations to six different languages. Asking Jim to contribute to our project was the natural thing to do. He was happy to help in wikifying the meanings of the words and then adding translations to the entries on Wiktionary.

In early June, we expect to have our app up and running on the Google Play Store and our work presented to the public in a local event at the Municipal Library of Argostoli. We're looking forward to receiving feedback from the best judges around: the locals themselves! Our summer plans include holding an outdoor Wiktionary editathon at a local cafe: if we bring the category up to 100 entries we could then build a new app with levels of difficulty, and – why not? – illustrated with images from Commons. The possibilities are endless! Keep up with our progress by following Argostoli Evening School's blog and the Wikitherapy page on Facebook.

Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program at the Argostoli Evening School in Greece here.