This is a submission for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Community
The Community
People who learned grammar the old way—and developers who recognize that parsing sentences and parsing code are the same skill.
This is for anyone who remembers diagramming sentences, anyone who is intrigued by the idea, parents who want their kids to learn analytical thinking, teachers looking for visual grammar tools, and programmers who'll see the parse tree hiding in a Reed-Kellogg diagram.
Picasso learned portraiture before cubism. e.e. cummings mastered form before abandoning it. You have to be good before you can break the rules and make art.
What I Built
Sr. Barbara's Class is a web-based sentence diagramming game to revive a nearly-lost art. Players see a sentence on a chalkboard, click words to identify their grammatical role, and watch the diagram build piece by piece. The aesthetic is intentional: chalk on slate, the way we learned it. A color-coded legend appears as you progress. Sr. Barbara offers commentary. A "Show Solution" button keeps things low-stress—this is about learning patterns, not competition or punishment.
Sentences range from easy ("The cat sat.") to hard, including garden-path sentences that fool your parsing instincts before resolving.
Why I Built It
In the 1970s, back at St. Pat's elementary school, Sr. Barbara drilled us relentlessly on sentence diagramming. Reed-Kellogg diagrams—the kind where you place the subject and verb on a baseline, hang modifiers on slanted lines, and branch prepositional phrases below.
It was tedious. It was exacting. None of us understood why it mattered. But—and I would never have admitted this to any other 7th grader—I was into it. The sense of accomplishment I felt once I'd learned what went where on the diagrams was real. And ever since those drills, when I look at a sentence, in my mind's eye it falls into its component parts.
Which explains why, as soon as I got my hands on a computer keyboard, coding came naturally.
Breaking a sentence into its grammatical components—subject, predicate, objects, modifiers—is the same mental operation as parsing code. Sr. Barbara was teaching us to think like programmers before personal computers existed. The baseline of a Reed-Kellogg diagram is a parse tree. She just drew it horizontally.
Demo
git clone https://github.com/carolynboyle/sr-barbara.git
cd sr-barbara
docker compose up --build
Then visit http://localhost:5000
Code
carolynboyle
/
sr-barbara
Educational web browser game to make diagramming sentences fun and profitable :D
Sr. Barbara's Class
A web-based sentence diagramming game using the Reed-Kellogg method.
The Story
In the 1970s, at St. Patrick's elementary school, Sr. Barbara drilled us for years on sentence diagramming. We parsed sentences into their grammatical bones—subject, predicate, modifiers hanging on their slanted lines, prepositional phrases branching below.
What none of us realized at the time: Sr. Barbara was teaching computational thinking decades before that term existed. Breaking a sentence into its logical components, understanding how each piece relates to the whole, recognizing patterns and hierarchies—this is programming. The baseline of a Reed-Kellogg diagram is the skeleton of a parse tree.
This game is a tribute to that teaching, and a way to implement a nearly-lost educational technique in an entertaining way, while quietly teaching the same analytical skills that programmers use every day.
Learning the Rules Makes Breaking Them Work
There is a massive difference between a writer…
How I Built It
Flask backend, PostgreSQL database with a normalized schema for sentences and grammatical relationships, vanilla JavaScript, and SVG-rendered diagrams—all in a Docker container. Adminer is included for anyone who wants to poke around the database. To access the game's Adminer interface, visit Database admin: http://localhost:8080 (login credentials can be found in README.md in the github repo).
Sr. Barbara, wherever you are: thank you. The lessons stuck longer than either of us expected.
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