a brand new building dedicated to handwriting practice,
inspired by the medieval monastic tradition and patroned by Alcuin of York,
the scholar who reformed European writing under Charlemagne in the 8th century.
A complete handwriting recognition pipeline:
Players print blank pages from SLF, write by hand, photograph them with a mobile
device, and the system reads back what they wrote. Each player trains a personal
neural network that learns their own handwriting style — the more they write, the
better the recognition becomes.
Key features:
A custom CNN (200K parameters) trained per player, with active learning correction.
Mobile capture pipeline: 3 QR finder patterns, homography correction, automatic
character segmentation.
Bootstrap with the Sassoon Primary font, then progressive learning of the player's
own handwriting from a→z, A→Z, accents and punctuation.
Recognition rates reach 95%+ on trained text and 80%+ on new sentences.
Fast training via custom C++ DLL (OpenBLAS, ~10 minutes for the full alphabet)
with C# fallback for WebGL.
Paper format selection: A4 or US Letter — works on any home printer, no special
material required.
10 progressive scenarios covering the full handwriting curriculum:
From bootstrap (writing each letter several times for the CNN to learn) to free
writing of historical sentences about Alcuin and Charlemagne — players learn to
write while discovering history.
Educational philosophy:
"Drawing words" — writing by hand as a cognitive act. The hand is the continuation
of the brain. By writing, we imprint the gesture and we remember better.