I think such a stack belongs in the category "for revolution novices" like Klaus Major's "memory" stack or my stack "seminar01", which (the latter) - among other examples - contains directions to build a basic vocabulary trainer with gradually increasing complexity.
I have added the scramble-word stack to my website <www.sanke.org/MetaMedia> on page "Sample Stacks" and "Tools for Development".
A screenshot can be seen here <http://www.sanke.org/Metamedia/Screenshots.htm>.
Direct download from <http://www.sanke.org/Software/simplewordscramble.zip> (11 KB).
The stack is an example of a "guided" exercise, where the focus is on "learning" and not on "testing", two pairs of shoes which are very often mixed up. Support - the "guidance" - for the learner is offered in various ways:
1. When the learner types into the input field, the typed letters disappear from the scramble field. Only letters contained in the scramble field can be typed into the input field, otherwise a "warning" will appear.
2. If the user deletes letters from the input field, they reappear in the scramble field; the learner can move the cursor inside the input field using the arrow keys, then press the backspace key to remove the letter on the left of the cursor.
3. You can re-scramble the word to possibly get a better idea what the word could be.
4. Pressing "Help" shows the first and last letter of the sought word and displays dashes as placeholders for the remaining letters in between.
5. Button "more letters", which appears after first pressing button "Help", adds more - randomly selected - letters to the help field. The last two dashes in a word however remain, the user has to find out them on his/her own.
"Simple" as it is, the exercise card of the stack needs 25 controls to achieve the described basic functionality and 8 of them contain scripts. The longest script is that of the input field, which controls the features 1. and 2. explained above. This script makes use of the "offset" function, "returninfield" and "rawkey" handlers, and the "selectedchunk" function, the last one to determine the place of the insertion point in the input field. A special problem comes up when you have to deal with special "national" characters, because the "rawkey" values in this case are different from the "numtochar" values; therefore I included some script lines to take care of the German "Umlaute" (ä, ö, ü).
Enhancements to the stack could added in many directions; in a workshop for Revolution newbies I would - as an example - assign the tasks
a) to display a translation along with the scrambled word, and
b) to add the possibility to export the lexicon to an external text file and to import from a choice of external files.
--Wilhelm Sanke
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