New Year, New Words
With another year in the books, I wanted to take some time to reflect on 2022 and look forward to 2023.
This year was bound to be an interesting one, with most classrooms returning to in-person teaching. I was curious to see how this shift would affect usage of Knoword, and the results were not what I was expecting.
- Knoword usership grew by 23% in 2022 compared to 2021
- Users were spending more time with us on average: 7 minutes per session versus 6.5 minutes the previous year
- Visitors from the USA increased by 48.06%
- Visitors from China grew by 327%
- Visitors from Saudi Arabia grew by a whopping 500%
These stats paint an exciting picture. Despite the transition back to in-person schooling, teachers have continued keeping Knoword as a part of their educational toolbelt, and our efforts to translate the game into other languages has had an impact on breaking into new markets.
But that's not all. Here are a few metrics about how Knoword was used last year:
- 9,549 packs created
- 1,738 worksheets downloaded
- 5,141 assignments created by teachers
- 170,812 assignments completed by students
- 216,629 quick play games played
- 285,630 pack games played, 100,839 (35%) of which were using multiple choice mode
Patch notes
A few days ago, on New Year's Eve, we released a major update to Knoword. The main motivation of this release was a technical one, as we rewrote the site in TypeScript for better stability, and worked on making small performance improvements across the board. These changes might not sound terribly exciting to our users, but will give us more confidence in the systems that make Knoword tick.
We also rolled out some changes that I think are worth getting excited for:
- Flash cards: Fixed a bug that was preventing users from previewing or downloading worksheets in flash card mode ☠️
- Added Hindi translations to all game modes 🇮🇳
- Pre-game screen: A brand new pre-game design puts the pack front and center, spaces out game settings more elegantly, and adds fun animations to the time limit and game mode/difficulty selectors
Finally, we added a new feature called public profiles. When you enable your public profile in your account settings, you'll get a page that shows all of the public packs that you've created. Packs marked as unlisted won't show up here. You can also enable and disable your public profile page at any time.
This will make it easier than ever to share your word packs with students, friends, or colleagues. Many thanks to Espie from Hawaii for suggesting this feature back in August, and I'm happy that it finally saw the light of day.
I'll wrap this post up by sending my sincere thanks to everyone who used Knoword in 2022. To the long-time users, thank you for sticking with us. To the people who just discovered Knoword, welcome! I hope everyone enjoys their time here, and if there's anything that we can do differently to make your experience even better, please let us know.
—Trevor from Knoword