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Introduction

General

"There are no bad pupils, there are only bad learning methods." This provocative sentence, quoted by Sebastian Leitner (see his book "So lernt man lernen"), is a comfort for all "bad" pupils - and simultaneously a stimulation for them to find better learning methods.

The software "Teachmaster" is my proposition for a (hopefully good) learning software. With this software, you can edit and learn vocabulary of any language. Various learning methods give you the possibility to learn individually according to your wishes, whereas you can control your learning success with statistics anytime.

Teachmaster is organised in four parts: You enter and edit your vocabulary in the Editor and learn them in the Teaching program. You will need the other two parts of Teachmaster less frequently: The Converter allows the import and export of vocabulary files, and the Quiz is a multiple choice test.

Teachmaster is freeware and can be used free of charge.

Until Teachmaster 1.5, vocabulary files had the suffix .vok, vocabulary files since version 2.0 have the suffix .vok2.

Organisation of vocabulary

Teachmaster stores the vocabulary in so-called "vocabulary items". A vocabulary item consists of five entries:

• Lesson
• Word in language 1 (e.g. English)
• Word in language 2 (e.g. German)
• Synonym(s)
• Remarks

The last two entries are optional. Information on a pronunciation file is also stored in the field "Remarks". The design of the vocabulary items allows you to learn any language you want to, for example English→German, English→French oder Greek→Russian. In the "Teaching program" you can also learn backwards (e.g. German→English instead of English→German). To keep track of your words, it is advised not to store more than 30 entries in one lesson.

The boxes

Besides other learning methods, Teachmaster supports the "boxes method" which features many advantages concerning learning psychology.

The basic idea of this "boxes method" is that every vocabulary item is located in exactly one of five boxes. A box represents the learning success of the vocabulary items it contains. The five boxes of Teachmaster are made up like this:

• Box 1 ("best" words)
• Box 2
• Box 3
• Box 4
• Box 5 ("worst" words)

In the beginning, each vocabulary item is in box 3 (you can change this box to 5 in the "Preferences"). If you enter the correct answer, the vocabulary item moves one box up (respectively remains in box 1, if it already has been there), otherwise it drops into the last box (respectively stays there, if it already has been there).

Therefore, the purpose of this method is to move as many vocabulary items as possible upward.

The start window

The start window, which gets displayed by opening the software, shows you all four parts of Teachmaster: Editor, Teaching program, Converter and Quiz.



The combobox underneath the four buttons displays the languages with which you can run the interface of Teachmaster. This is realized by so-called "language files" with the suffix .lang, which are stored in the Teachmaster program directory. With the installation of Teachmaster, you the languages English and German are delivered. Further language files and a documentation on how to create them can be found on the Teachmaster homepage.



If you start the software with a double click, the start windows displays the filename given to Teachmaster. In the Editor and in the Learning program, this file gets loaded automatically. If you want Teachmaster to "forget" this file and therefore stop the automatical loading, just klick on "Discard".

Miscellaneous

The global program settings are stored in the registry, namely in the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Stem/Teachmaster2. You can view the stored data with the registry editor of Windows.

The term "language file" may lead to misunderstandings. On the one hand, there are language files or interface files with the suffix .lang which provide the multi-lingual interface. On the other hand, there are pronunciation files with the suffixes .wav or .mp3 which can be included in the single vocabulary items.

Package overview

Here is an overview of all files which are included in the Teachmaster package. The files needed for uninstallation are not in this list.

• Teachmaster.exe (main program file)
• deutsch.lang (German language file)
• english.lang (English language file)
• license.txt (license agreement)
• Website.url (link to the Teachmaster homepage)

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