The School Loop assignments that I have had have forced me to improve Academist's word filtering. Last post, I talked about how I made the Chrome Extension filter out common words in assignments like "study" and "quiz" that would interfere with the search algorithm. I made a list of similar words, including anything that came to mind. However, the words that came to mind were only a fraction of possible words and phrases that should be filtered out of an assignment name. I did not consider the words "lab" or "report" until I had a lab report due. Speaking of which, I also added the word "due" to the list. Here is an example of an assignment for which Academist would not have found Khan Academy topics if it weren't for improving the word filtering:
Academist filters out "Complete" and "Lab" in order to utilize the useful search term "Cons. of Momentum."
For the past two weeks, I have constantly been seeing assignments with words that were interfering with searching for Khan Academy topics. Adding these words has ultimately improved Academist, but the fact that I haven't stopped encountering them is a sign that I may never be able to make the word filtering robust. However, that is only one part of Academist, and certainly not the most important.
Testing Academist against all my assignments has led me to consider another important, yet simple, improvement. Khan Academy contains topics, but also descriptions of those topics. I also noticed that I had an assignment for chemistry class that involved "Colligative Properties," but there was no Khan Academy topic or video with that phrase. However, it was contained in the description of the Khan Academy topic, "Mixtures and solutions." This simply means that I will modify the code that generates the files used by Academist that store data from Khan Academy to include the description for each topic. Adding the description to be used in the search algorithm is also a simple process.
So far, I am still on to-do number one out of five on the to-do list I made on October 4th. There is still a lot to be done, so I will hope that I will have the time to make Academist into a truly useful tool.
