I built this app to help my daughter grow a broader vocabulary through short, repeatable play sessions. The core interaction is inspired by the ‘‘word triangle’’ puzzle tradition, a simple, progressive word exercise that scaffolds letter and sound awareness. I use OpenAI to generate varied prompts and Cursor for the development experience. I intentionally designed the app to be lightweight and approachable so parents and educators can use it for five minutes a day to support early literacy. I welcome open source contributions to iterate on prompts, accessibility, and language coverage.

Many caregivers want an easy, low-friction activity to expand young children’s vocabularies without turning to long-form screen time. Traditional flashcards or story sessions are effective but require more time and planning. I set out to create a five-minute activity that reinforces word recognition, phonics, and contextual usage so parents can maintain consistent, daily practice. The app targets short, scaffolded interactions that fit into transitional moments between errands, or during brief waits making vocabulary practice repeatable and sustainable.

The app centers on the word-triangle idea: a progressive, visual puzzle where words change incrementally across rows. I researched the puzzle tradition and found that word-triangle–style exercises appear across historic and educational puzzle collections because they naturally scaffold orthography and phonological awareness. Using a triangular pattern works well for children: it creates a predictable visual structure, emphasizes incremental changes in letters and sounds, and supports pattern recognition. I combine that structure with OpenAI-generated prompts to keep examples varied and age-appropriate.

I built the UI and flow using Cursor with a Next.js + React front end and TypeScript for type safety. Backend interactions with OpenAI power the dynamic generation of word sequences and hints; Node.js handles lightweight API calls. The app is hosted on Vercel for fast edges and quick iteration. I designed the code and prompts to be easy to adapt so contributors can add new languages, difficulty levels, or accessibility improvements. The architecture favors small, testable pieces so we can iterate on prompt design and UX independently.

In practice the experience encourages daily micro-practice that supports vocabulary growth and early literacy skills like decoding and morphological awareness. My next steps are to open source the project (or expand contributions), add logging for optional anonymized usage metrics, and extend language support and adaptive difficulty. I’m also exploring teacher feedback loops and printable worksheets derived from in-app puzzles to bridge screen and off-screen practice while keeping the app lightweight and privacy-respectful.