New project

I have 23 days left before graduation and absolutely no motivation left to study or do much of anything else. However, I committed to finishing 25 credit hours during this last term, so there are 2439802349804238902344 that have to get done in the next three weeks. So, instead of studying, new project!

I don’t have time to work on this yet, so right now all I have is a basic webpage with audio clips, using Pokemon Go sound effects as a temporary solution. The labels are pretty self-explanatory: I’m playing the background music constantly, then click the play buttons each time I finish reading/writing a sentence, paragraph, or chapter/section. Usually after a few minutes I actually start to focus and quit feeling the need to click the button every time I finish the smaller parts.

Ideally, I’d like to make this into a Chrome extension with music designed for it, auto-detection of things like the end of a sentence, paragraph, or chapter, adding/reviewing flashcards, right/wrong answers to flashcards, switching away from the tabs related to studying, etc. I think it would gamify studying in a way that’s not limited to what material is available through a particular platform.

I’d love to have an option similar to this extension so that a user could indicate that they were reading something and then play a negative sound if they looked away. And in the opposite way, if they were supposed to be reading a physical text, then stop the music if they looked at the screen (though that would be complicated with multiple devices).

And of course it could all log to Beeminder – minutes studied being positive data points, minutes distracted being negative.

Another more simple plan: make an audio track similar to the background music but with the reward chimes marking each one minute, five minute, and fifteen minute intervals to motivate while studying in general.

I think something like this would be good for coding too, or exercise, or all kinds of things really.

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Fascinating and delightful! Eager to see how this develops!

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The reading/writing background song is so intense! Love it!

Khan Academy does a very lite version of this, triggering a short celebratory sound every time you get an answer right. It really makes you feel good.

Curious how you’d determine when the user finished reading a sentence using the Chrome extension? Maybe you could highlight the current sentence and then the user could use the arrow keys to move to the next?

Also, love the idea of using this while programming or doing other types of regular job work. You could have a “committed code” sound and a “completed feature” sound. So many possibilities!

You could also have different “themes” the user could select, which would switch out different sets of sounds–Mario, Zelda, Cave Story, etc.

I looked through your GitHub repos and don’t see one for this. Maybe I’m missing it? Any chance you could stick it in its own repository? (No pressure. I don’t want to be giving you new tasks when you’re in crunch time for school!)

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Yeah, Khan Academy is great with this! Duolingo and Clozemaster also do this, and I’m sure a lot of others, but those are all really motivating for me. I just don’t like being limited by the content they have on the individual sites.

About how to determine when a user finished reading a sentence: I’m not sure yet, but some text-to-speech programs highlight individual sentences as they’re being read, so it seems possible.

I think there are probably copyright issues and that I shouldn’t even have used Pokemon go sounds, but I’m assuming it’s okay for something I threw together for personal use. Themes would help it not become boring though!

I don’t have a repo started for the chrome extension yet, just the webpage. I just thought this would be a good place to get feedback and other ideas so when I start on the real thing I have a better plan. Thank you so much for the awesome thoughts! I’ll share the repo once I get started :slight_smile:

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