Magic Word was created as part of the GAMER work package in the Innovalangues project at the Stendhal University in Grenoble, France. Innovalangues is a language learning centered IDEFI project (Initiatives in Excellence for Innovative Education) and will run from 2012 to 2018.

Based on a request by Innovalangue, this first version of Magic Word was designed and developed by two students of linguistics in the Language Industries master’s program, Pauline Rebourgeon and Christine Lutian, for their end-of-study professional project. Initially conceived for learners of English or Italian, the Innovalanges project hopes to adapt Magic Word for additional languages.

Magic Word is a word search game, based on Boggle, and developed as a learning aid for foreign language learners.

The game has two modes, solo and versus.

• In the solo mode, players can play as many rounds independently as they wish;
• In the versus mode, players go head-to-head and play three rounds.

At the end of a round, and to add to the learning experience, players can view definitions of all the possible words in the grid, as well as see suggestions for words that they played that were not found in the dictionary. They can then choose to review words later by adding them to their own personal dictionary, the Wordbox. To encourage vocabulary acquisition, a word from a player’s Wordbox is selected at random to appear on the player’s homepage for further review.

• Apache Server with PHP 5.3+
• MySQL

• The content of the LANGUAGE RESOURCES folder should not be uploaded as is to the server but imported in the MySQL database
• TODO

• Pauline Rebourgeon
• Christine Lutian

• Maryam Nejat
• David Graceffa