Throughout our work there are many many unanswered questions; Whats the best way? Whats the fastest? What works for a client and why?

The problem is many of these questions are either hard to answer – or require a long detailed research study. Well we have one such question to do with our ongoing work supporting people who we assess to use morse code; Whats the fastest way of learning it? If you speak to traditional Morse users they largely say “Auditory” “You can’t use it fast unless you have heard it”. What they traditionally mean is the dot and dash sounds – because a lot of people use it for amateur radio operating where this is the medium. But – if you are using it to write – without hearing the sound – is it really auditory?

A study looked at this – and concluded a mixed approach was probably best – and interestingly that auditory alone wasn’t useful.  But the sample was small and the cues not that engaging. So how can we easily fix this?

Well we have taken the morse-learn game that Google made – and further developed it. Mainly:

• Adding Auditory cues
• Adding Visual cues that match the auditory cues (Download posters and cards if you need them in different colours: Blue, Green, Orange or Peach)
• Provide the ability to turn on/off these cues – along side the dot/dah sound
• And we can keep track of your learning – anonmously – to see how fast users take to get through the game. We honestly can’t track anything more – not your location, not your hobbies or dogs name. Just how fast it takes you to learn – and with what settings you are using. (If this means something to you  – take a look at the code https://github.com/AceCentre/morse-learn )

By having no authentication and making this truly open to anyone (and most important of all – FUN!) we hope to gain a greater understanding of how fast it takes people to learn morse.

Tips:

• Use chrome if you can. Its slightly less buggy (backstory: It was a chrome only experiment. We’ve done some work to make it as work as well as we can on safari/iOS but its not without some issues still)
• Stick to one device. As we have no login system we can’t migrate you from one device to another.
• Please try and stick with the settings you are given. These are randomised to make sure a random sample of people are provided different options

Check it out at https://morse-learn.acecentre.net