Table of Contents

• This is mspelling!
• Installation
• Description
• Usage
• Contributing to this project
• Author
• License

This is mspelling!

mspelling is a Spanish spelling test developed for research on spelling skills. mSpelling was design to be as easy to administer and as flexible as possible to facilitate conducting research on spelling skills.

It presents the words to be spelled by playing audio files and the participant writes the word using the keyboard.

At the end of the session, mspelling saves the results to a CSV file, which is supported by most popular spreadsheet software these days like Excel.

The software is developed using the Python programming language v3.

Better documentation is coming very soon!

Note: Because mspelling is used mostly for research with elementary-school children the interface is adapted in a format appropriate for them and may not be appropriate for other age groups. However, you can customize how mspelling looks and "feel" very easy if you know a little about python and the Kivy framework (python library).

Installation

1. Install poetry (instructions)
2. Download mspelling or clone it into your computer using git
3. Open mspelling's directory using terminal or cmd (check this cheatsheet for more info)
4. Run poetry install to install mspelling and all its dependencies. You can see the list in the pyproject.toml file

That is it! mspelling is ready to be used!

Description

• mspelling has a very simple interface and walks the user through a series of screens. The sequence is as follows:
  • Welcome message
  • Login screen: Participants enter the id assigned to them
  • Get ready message
  • Spelling activity screen: Participants hear the words and type them. mspelling presents all the words specified in the stimuli file (see below).
  • Goodbye message: Results are saved and the participants can press any key to end the session.

Usage

• run the main.py file using python (python3 main.py) and mspelling will start

• There are two types of sessions in mspelling: practice and experimental sessions

  • The session is considered practice if no participant id is provided. In this case, mspelling will read the words from stimuli/words/practice.csv.
  • The session is considered an experimental session if a participant id is provided. The id can contain letters, numbers, and symbols. In this case, mspelling will read the words from mspelling/stimuli/words/experimental.csv.

• In both cases, mspelling expects:

  • the audio for each word to be in the mspelling/stimuli/audio/ folder. All audio files must be in wav format.
  • The text stimuli must be in a column named word of the CSV file.

• At the end of the session, mSpelling stores the results in the mspelling/results folder. The name of the file will be identified with the participant's code (blank for practice sessions) and the current date and time.

  mspelling comes with a short demo version of 5 Spanish words. Go ahead and try it! Just use mspelling like a practice session (no user id).

Contributing to this project

All contributions are welcome!

If you encounter any bugs, please open an issue on GitHub.

To contribute to this project, clone the repository, add your contribution, and submit a pull request. Be sure to run the tests or provided a test-case if adding new functionality.

Author

This project was developed by Mario E. Bermonti-Pérez as part of his academic research. Feel free to contact me at mbermonti@psm.edu or mbermonti1132@gmail.com

License

This project is licensed under the GPL License. See the LICENSE.txt file for details.