Learn a New Language In the Moments You Spend Idle with MIT’s New App Prateek Jose - SnapMunk
go to original May 17, 2017

WaitSuite uses “micro-moments” - extremely small intervals of time otherwise spent idle - to teach you new vocabulary words and test how far along you’ve gotten. (MITCSAIL)

What do you do while waiting for a reply to a chat message or your phone to connect to the WiFi? Instead of letting the old existential dread creep up on you again, you could be using that time to learn something. Like a new language.

WaitSuite is a series of apps developed by the folks at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). It makes use of “micro-moments” – extremely small intervals of time otherwise spent idle – to widen your vocabulary in a new language and test how far along you’ve gotten.

There are five specific daily tasks WaitSuite targets as part of its delightfully opportunistic didactic method. That includes when you’re waiting to connect to a WiFi network, an email or message to send, the elevator to arrive, or a page to load on your phone. Those might seem like tiny durations of time, but the team found that users learned about 57 new words in two weeks.

The app WaitSuite uses to teach language within instant messengers is called WaitChatter. It is available for free download as a Chrome extension off of the Chrome Web Store.

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