Granular Strictness

By default, Knoword is pretty lenient about how it judges your answers. It doesn’t care about capitalization or punctuation. If you’re guessing the word “Chicago” and you write “chicago” with a lowercase C, we’ll still give it to you.

This is handy for keeping the game fast-paced and easy to pick up, but for some teachers, it’s not testing the right things.

I was recently emailed by a Spanish teacher who wanted to make sure that their students could practice the course vocabulary using the correct accents, like in the words “sí” or “sábado” (Saturday). Luckily, assignments give us this ability, and today this feature just became even more flexible.

Previously, you could toggle on the “Strict capitalization and punctuation” option, which made students have to spell each word with the correct capitalization, punctuation, and accents. Now, each of these strictness rules can be configured individually. For example, if you only care about correct accent use, you can turn on Strict accents and leave capitalization and punctuation off.

☝️ Note: If you used the strict option in any of your existing assignments, it will be updated with each of the individual strictness rules turned on.

This feature makes assignments even more flexible as a tool for creating custom vocabulary quizzes and course review, and it was made possible by feedback from the Knoword community. If there’s anything you think we could be doing better, please let us know and your feedback may turn into a blog post like this in the future.

—Trevor from Knoword