Preposition fill-in drill: turning reading into recall
A Drill tab on the prepositions page: blank out the preposition in a phrase, type it, get checked. Items come from both the curated primer and the learner's own mined clip phrases — so reading the diagrams turns into active recall.
The prepositions page so far was for reading — diagrams and examples you absorb. But you don't learn a preposition by recognizing it; you learn it by producing it. So the page got a second tab: Drill.
It's the simplest possible active-recall loop. A phrase appears with the preposition blanked: go _____ work. You type one. It checks (case-insensitive), shows you the full phrase plus the sense, and moves on, tracking your score. Get it wrong and it shows the right answer in red, no penalty — the point is reps, not grades.
The nice part is where the items come from. Two sources, mixed and shuffled:
- the curated primer examples (so the drill is full from the very first use), and
- the learner's own mined clip phrases — every preposition the analysis pulled from their clips becomes a drill item, linking back to the clip it came from.
So as you mine more clips, the drill quietly becomes yours — you're not drilling textbook sentences, you're drilling the prepositions from the developer talks you actually watched. That's the whole sentence-mining thesis applied to recall.
Implementation was deliberately thin: it's frontend-only, reusing the existing /api/prepositions/mined endpoint and the static primer — no new backend, no migration. The page now has Browse / Drill tabs (Base UI). Next up is the chunk-shadowing mode for the speaking side of the problem.