The Syntra Learning Platform and the Carpe Diem Language-Learning Game: Examples, Exercises, Assessment Plans, and AI-Assisted Software Development

Abstract

The project is being developed as a language-learning course that combines examples and exercises with programming tasks and models, as well as proposed assessment and examination tasks. Its central principle is that students do not merely use ready-made language-learning tools but participate in creating, modifying, and extending them. Thus, students learn languages while simultaneously developing the tools and the linguistic-technological environment in which their own learning takes place.

The paper discusses the Syntra learning platform and the Carpe Diem linguistic game as the starting point for a broader language-learning environment in which language acquisition is combined with the creation of the learning tools themselves. The central principle of the project is that students do not merely use ready-made language-learning tools but actively participate in creating and modifying them according to their own learning needs.
In this approach, the student acts simultaneously in two interconnected roles: as a language learner and as a developer of their own learning environment. Working with parallel texts in several languages, the student divides texts into lexical units and phrases, identifies correspondences between languages, constructs multilingual tables and JSON data structures, uses phonetic rendering of texts, and gradually proceeds towards developing their own Syntra- and Carpe Diem-type tools. The use of artificial intelligence and large language models makes it possible to involve in this process students who do not have professional training in programming.
Language acquisition thus takes place not within a finished and predetermined learning environment, but within an environment that is itself being created in the course of learning. The student learns a language by constructing tools for learning it; and, by constructing these tools, develops a deeper understanding of the language itself and of its lexical, grammatical, and multilingual structures. At the same time, the student learns to work with digital linguistic data, artificial intelligence tools, and elementary methods of software development.
Syntra and Carpe Diem should therefore not be regarded in this project merely as individual computer programs or language-learning tools. They are examples of a linguistic-technological learning environment in which the boundaries between learning, the creation of learning materials, and software development become fluid. The aim of the project is to develop this approach into an environment in which students can select languages and texts, construct their own multilingual learning materials, experiment with their linguistic organization, and, with the assistance of AI, create new tools for further language learning.
This project is being developed as a course that includes examples, exercises, programming samples and guidelines, as well as proposed assessment and examination tasks.