Words cut off in drag and drop type

Submitted by twaltzing on Sat, 02/19/2022 - 04:26
Forums: 
Bugs in content types

I'm working on some exercises in a somewhat uncommon language, and our spelling includes marks for long vowels (:) and glottal stops ('). Whenever either of these is in a word, they seem to split the word despite the *s being around the entire word.

tehotá:'on  gets cut up into tehota (the draggable answer) with a "tip" that reads  'on

niwenhní:seres gets cut up onti niwenhní  and then a "tip" that reads seres (don't know where the : ends up)

I believe this is probably a hard-coded feature but it would be great if the token for separating words could be modified so that these marks do not break the words.

Thanks!

papi Jo's picture

papi Jo

Tue, 02/22/2022 - 11:36

You are meaning the Drag the Words H5P activity type (not Drag and Drop).

The problem you are describing arises from the fact that the colon character (:) was arbitrarily chosen by the creators of the Drag the Words activity to add a tip, as explained here:  You may add a textual tip, using a colon (:) in front of the tip.

It would be extremely easy to change this behaviour in the Drag the Words activity script, but the H5P programers have other priorities.

In the meantime you could use the following workaround, which I have tried and tested and can assure that it works. When you edit your words to be dragged, replace the normal colon (:) with the Unicode character called "modifier letter colon". Easy u+A789 copy paste ꞉

For instance, instead of niwenhní:seres, type niwenhní꞉seres. It doesn't look quite so nice, but it does solve your problem, as shown on the attached screenshots (names of months taken from this Mohawk Vocabulary page).

 

Attachments: 
Image icon 2022-02-22_11-21-10.jpg

twaltzing

Wed, 02/23/2022 - 03:55

I appreciate the workaround, that will keep things going.

It would be great, though, if someone could take the 10 minutes needed to change that one character. It probably doesn't seem important to most people, but there are so few resources for teaching Indigenous languages that when a tool doesn't work, it's a much bigger problem proportionately than for someone teaching, say, Spanish.

BV52's picture

BV52

Thu, 02/24/2022 - 18:42

Hi twaltzing,

For someone who only knows basic coding I know that this won't take even 10 mins. However testing takes time and the biggest hurdle is making sure that existing contents are not broken which will happen if you simple replace one character for the other.

I do understand the need for the change and I will reach out to the dev team though I can't promise anything.

-BV

otacke's picture

otacke

Tue, 02/22/2022 - 12:30

It would be extremely easy to change this behaviour in the Drag the Words activity script, but the H5P programers have other priorities.

Who are the H5P programmers? H5P is a community project and anyone can decide to contribute the required code to e.g. make the colon escapable or exchangable for a different character and to make sure that existing content doesn't break.

twaltzing

Wed, 02/23/2022 - 03:48

Thanks for the workaround, that will keep things going for the time being. It's very clever!

The use of a colon to indicate vowel length is not THAT unusual, though. Kanyen'keha is not the only language that does this. It would seem prudent to alter that chosen character so that others will not have the same problem.