// Project 02 — Independent
Word World — AI Dictionary for Kids
My seven-year-old brother was trying to learn English on his own, and I realised that even with Google right there, dictionary definitions are still written for adults. So I built one for kids aged four to ten. A search returns an age-appropriate definition, pronunciation, example sentences, synonyms, and an AI-generated comic strip illustrating the word in context. Saved words feed quizzes and crossword puzzles.
// Engineering highlights
- Free to operate, by design. Each unique combination of word, age group and prompt version is generated once and served from a shared cache thereafter, and comics are compressed to WebP to stretch the free Supabase storage quota. New comic generations are now capped at 5 a day, so the running cost stays predictable while cached words remain unlimited.
- No log-in required. Signing up is friction a seven-year-old doesn't need, so there isn't one. Saved words and quiz progress live in the browser's local storage instead of behind an account.
- Degrading gracefully. Words are validated against a dictionary API before any model call, so invalid input never triggers a paid request. The same check doubles as the defence against prompt injection: a sentence of instructions isn't a dictionary word, so it fails validation and never reaches the model. If comic generation fails the text still returns; if text generation fails nothing is cached, so the next request retries.
// Stack
- Supabase
- Postgres words table and comic storage
- Vercel
- Frontend hosting and serving
- Cloudflare
- Domain and DNS