I am proud to introduce Cactus Connect, an app that facilitates people of all nationalities across the globe to connect with each other and help each other learn their language in two-person “teams”. We believe that when people across the globe know each other, we all benefit. We chose a cactus as our logo because although it looks tough, it is actually a plant which needs ongoing care and watering. And we use this as a symbol for your team’s progress with helping each other.
THe basis of this app is learning languages together through flashcards as a team: one player helps the other player learn their language using flashcards in the user’s language, and vice versa. Users select the languages they want to learn, and the language they want to teach. You select words for your teammate to study and vice versa. Our app automatically pairs the languages and translates the words into the selected language. We designed this to be a very simple and soft UI, to go with the overall feel of easy access to studying your language. Because the database is coded into the app, you can study offline and anywhere without access to internet.
Word Erp was created in Xcode for the Apple App Store. We used many different packages to build this app, including but not limited to GameKit, and MessageKit. The logo is originally drawn. The database is built into the app, and all images and fonts are loaded into the assets folder. We created a universal custom variables page to standardize all color choices, font sizes, and many more including corner radius of buttons, and transitions.
Our inspiration for this app is as two students who take multiple language courses, we wanted to make something where you could chat and practice with native speakers. Between the flashcard renforcement of vocab, the speed challenge of the game, and the actual conversations with people, we thought that this would be really useful for people like us who want to become fluent in the languages we are learning.
When users select “practice” they see the flashcards and can swipe left and right for the next and previous card, as well as down for the definition. The scrollers at the top are where you set the languages.
The option “play” is a multiplayer game that connects your phone to other people waiting to play the game using game center. Because it is using game center, the only private information shared is the public username you have chosen when creating your account. When you have connected with another person, you both have to click play to start the game. Once the game has started you have a three second countdown and sixty seconds to play the game.You and your teammate take turns selecting the correct definition for the words. User A is choosing a word for User B to define in the language User B has selected to learn. Then User B chooses a word for User A to define. Your team gets a score together instead of playing against your teammate, and with each correct turn, another point is added to your collective score.
Here is a fun feature: as your score increases, so does the health of your Cactus. The health of your cactus is displayed through changing colors of the cactus eyes. And if you stop playing as a team tigether, as time passes points are removed from your score, and this degrades the health of your cactus.
There is a leaderboard to see who has the highest score.
The last page is titled “me” and it is the settings section of our app. You can select your native language for the “definition term” and the language you want to study as the “vocab term”. k. We chose these five languages (english, french, spanish, mandarin and hindi) as they are the most spoken languages in the world. We plan to expand the database to include more languages, as and many more words.
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