DingsBums?! is a vocabulary-focused learning tool designed as flashcards. It helps learners memorize new words.
One of the key features of DingsBums?! is the ability to create new flashcard training stacks from scratch. Units and categories can be used to organize the cards, and users have the option to define their own entry types with grammatical attributes. For instance, gender and plural for nouns in a language like French. Users can assign an entry type to each entry, which will determine how different attributes are handled.
Existing entries can have their entry types changed, and users can edit entry type attribute items and assign a default to each entry type attribute. Entry type attributes can be freely assigned to entry types, but deletion of units, categories, entry types, entry type attributes, and entry type attribute items is restricted if they are used in an entry.
The labels in the GUI can be changed to suit the learning stack card purpose. Users can decide whether changes in an entry while editing or learning are checked immediately against the current selection criteria and eventually remove the entry from the current selection.
DingsBums?! also offers hints of remembrance when learning one-by-one, to help users recall a term they might not remember completely. The hints include displaying more letters of the word, flashing the entire term for less than a second, shuffling the letters within each word, etc.
The tool provides three game-like learning environments called "learning by choice," where users pick the right answer out of possible choices for a given question, match base/term with target/definition as pairs of choices by moving the mouse pointer from the question to the matching answer, or choose the correct answer among lots of possibilities with questions shifting after a few seconds.
An intelligent learning algorithm shows those entries, which users do not know that well, most often. The goal is to earn a point whenever the user knows the word or loses points when they don't. However, no points are given when they remember the word only after receiving a hint. Users can reset scores to the minimum for either all entries or the current selection.
Other features of DingsBums?! include the ability to dynamically change the time in milliseconds of the flash hint, coverage in percents, and saving window positions and sizes. Users have the option to enable or disable logging to either the command line or a file.
The tool requires Java 1.4.2 or later to run, and the most important new features in the latest release include support for syntax highlighting of syllables, e.g., for pinyin (simplified Chinese) and simplified installation based on Java Web Start.