Leksi is a web app that increases vocabulary, which leads to stronger reading and writing skills. We focus on and ❤️ vocabulary because it's a major indicator of students’ success in school and the "real world".
Leksi features game-like activities based on a variety of empirical studies and techniques on how to best learn new vocabulary. Because research tells us that it takes 10-15 meaningful encounters with a word to truly learn it, Leksi's systemic approach is based on this. More specifically,
- Build a personal collection of words by looking up and saving words to their personal list
- Organize their words with tags
- Learn and practice their words by completing over 10 (and growing!) game-like activities for each respective one
- Track their progress, stats, and achievements each step of the way
- Look up and add words on behalf of any one student or all of them
- Track an individual student's progress and their entire classrooms', too
- Provide feedback by reviewing and responding to the "freestyle" content that students create as they complete some of the game-like activities
- Create their own content related to a word such as definitions, examples, or other word details and feedback related to some of the game-like activities
- Do it all 😆, i.e. do everything any other user can do and view app metrics
Our goal is to close the word gap with an app that not only improves student outcomes through vocabulary development, but also is really easy and fun to use. The original idea came out of my own personal frustrations when trying to learn new words. Through my research, I realized the importance vocabulary truly has and the huge impact it could have for many different folks, especially K-12 students.
Our approach with Leksi has been to try and release iterations quickly with the goal of providing an even more engaging and effective app. Because there are three different users with their respective use cases, it can sometimes be tricky to decide which features should be completed first. During a 10-week pilot with a school in Manhattan, the decisions were pretty easy to make -- focus on the students, fix any bugs, deliver on feature requests and/or enhancements, etc. It's not always this simple and so our thought process depends on factors like what the goal is, who it's for, and how long it'll likely take.
If you have any questions, comments, or concepts, I'd be happy to respond to them.
Danelson
😃