Wordinary: A Software Tool for Teaching Greek Word Families to Elementary School Students

Abstract

Learning word families, that is sets of words with the same root, is important for children of very young ages as it helps them to grow their reading and writing skills in Greek. This is why teaching such word families is one of the main topics of the Modern Greek courses in primary and secondary education of Greece. This paper presents Wordinary, an interactive desktop application that supports teachers in their efforts of teaching Greek word families to elementary school students. The application presented in this paper is the first of its kind that supports the Greek language. Wordinary is meant to be used by teachers to support the design of learning activities related to teaching Greek word families for any word found in the official schoolbooks of the six elementary school grades in Greece. The application was developed following a user-centered design approach and the Python programming language. Two usability evaluation studies were conducted, one user testing study involving end users, and one heuristic evaluation involving HCI experts. The studies found that Wordinary is a usable and useful application. Evaluation results also identified issues for improvement, which led to a redesigned version of Wordinary.