Word Dance

Now, show me how you [MASK] with your words!

This is a web game in which the player must write sentences with a word missing, such that a machine learning model fills in the missing word with a target word.

Of course it’s a great match for English language learners, but you’d be surprised at how intellectually challenging it can be even for those who are fluent! I find that often the crazier the sentence, the more likely it is to succeed.

Technologies

Programmed in Javascript using the React and Next.js frameworks
Currently deployed on Vercel

Do it yourself!

This game is INCREDIBLY simple to make! Check out the source here.

It could easily be the starter project in a Coding 101 level tutorial, since it’s just:

A single index.js file that handles all the game logic
An API route that calls the Hugging Face Inference API (can’t be called in the user-shipped JavaScript only because we don’t want to expose our authentication token)
And a couple of simple React components

If you’re sick of teaching beginners how to create React to-do list apps, I think Word Dance has a lot of opportunity for creativity and extension. There are a lot more interesting machine learning models on the Hugging Face Hub 😉

The Machine Learning Model

The machine learning model currently used is bert-base-uncased from the Hugging Face Hub

Authenticating with Hugging Face’s API

You will need your own HUGGINGFACE_API_TOKEN environment variable in order to authenticate with Hugging Face’s API and utilize their machine learning models.

You can add one in a .env.local file in the parent directory which Next.js will automatically load.