// 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
- Paying for each word once. Text and image generation cost money on every call, so each unique combination of word, age group and prompt version is generated once and served from a shared cache after that. The more words get looked up, the more requests hit the cache instead of a model, so the cost per lookup keeps falling. Comics are compressed to WebP to stay within the free Supabase storage tier, and new comic generations are capped at 5 a day to keep spending predictable. Cached words have no limit.
- 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
- Gemini
- Definition and comic generation
- Supabase
- Postgres words table and comic storage
- Vercel
- Frontend hosting and serving
- Cloudflare
- Domain and DNS