Overview
A bilingual English tutor for a very young child, built as a bag-of-cards game rather than a quiz screen. The tutor speaks a word — Czech, then English — you draw a card from the bag, and you say the English word back out loud. Get it right and it joins your collection on a little desk at the bottom of the screen; get it wrong three times and it falls back into the bag. An hourglass quietly runs down every minute and, when it empties, pulls a random card you've already won back out for a pop quiz — say it again or lose it.
How it works
- Three levels, following Cambridge's Pre-A1 Starters syllabus order: single vocabulary words, then a simple "I like/have + noun" sentence pattern, then fuller descriptive sentences with prepositions of place, each unfurling into a small animated canvas scene.
- Speech in both directions — the Web Speech API for text-to-speech (Czech, then English) and for listening to the child's attempt.
- A judgment call, not string matching — a small Cloudflare Worker sends what the recognizer heard plus the target word to Claude Haiku and asks whether it's a reasonable attempt for a 3.5-year-old. Both a toddler's pronunciation and the recognizer's mishearing of it are too messy for fixed rules, and the judgment deliberately favours the child.
- Graceful fallback — no speech recognition support falls back to a manual ✅/❌ confirm; no reachable Worker falls back to local fuzzy string matching, so the game still works offline, just less forgiving.
- The collection persists to
localStorage, per level.
Status
Still in development — the core game (three levels, the bag, the desk, the hourglass) is playable locally; the judging Worker needs a deploy step with its own API key before this can go live anywhere.