Carta Collēctiōnis¶
Carta Collēctiōnis is a collectible-card game layered onto the operative dossier in LAPIS cohorts. Each card names a grammatical target (for example Accusative Singular or Cum Clause), and students collect Latin forms that match it from the reading they are already doing. Every submission is checked instantly against Whitaker's Words, the morphology engine behind Alpheios, so there is no grading burden on you. Collecting forms earns LP, reveals the card's art and name, and eventually upgrades a card to a foil special edition.
The deck holds 70 cards across five categories: Divinity, Location, Mythic Person, Person, and Structure. Of these, 46 are earn cards built up by submitting forms, and 24 are special cards with no collection track. Four specials are starters that every operative owns from day one (Maecenas, Arch of Titus, Pompeii, Mars); the remaining 20 are Special Unlock cards that you grant from an operative's manage page. How a student comes to deserve one is up to you and your classroom economy.
Why It Matters¶
The game is built on a simple idea from second-language acquisition: forms are learned when a reader notices them in meaningful input, then meets them again and again in new contexts. A card gives a student a concrete reason to scan real Latin for one feature at a time, and a reason to keep looking once they have found the first example.
Because the app requires the phrase the form came from, every capture is a form-in-context encounter rather than a decontextualized paradigm drill. A student collecting the accusative singular is not reciting an ending; they are finding puellam doing the work of a direct object inside a sentence they understood well enough to trust. Repeated captures across different sentences let the pattern build inductively, which is how durable grammatical intuition actually forms.
The game also personalizes attention. The grammatical target on a card is fixed, but the content a student meets it in is theirs to choose. A student drawn to mythology will hunt the accusative through the Hercules and Troy material; one who loves the city will hunt it through Pompeii and the Forum. Both practice the same grammar, each through the reading that holds their interest, which is exactly the condition under which students read enough to internalize a form.
The parse-it-yourself verb cards push one step further, past recognition into a produced parse. Naming a form's person and number is where passive familiarity starts to become active knowledge.
How to frame it for students
Treat card collecting as sustained, low-stakes extensive reading, not a quiz. Point a student at a text and a card, and let them hunt. The reveal-and-foil loop rewards persistence, which is the behavior that turns a form a student can spot into a form a student owns.
Enabling Collections (Do This First)¶
Collections are hidden by default
Students see no Carta tab and no cards until you enable card collections for the cohort. A brand-new LAPIS cohort opens with three collections already on (Nominative Singular, Accusative Singular, and 3rd Person Singular verbs). A cohort created before this feature launched opens with zero. If your students cannot see the Carta tab, this is almost always why.
To enable collections:
- Open the cohort's Operatives view.
- Click Enable · Card Collections, next to the Bulk-award and Bulk-mark buttons.
- Tick the collections you want open, then save.
The list is flat, ordered by when each grammatical feature first appears formally in the LAPIS grammar scope, with a bracketed [Mission N] tag on each row. That tag is only a suggestion for when a collection might reasonably open; you can enable any card at any time. The page also shows how many forms the cohort has already collected per card, so you can see which collections are active before turning one off.
Disabling is safe
Turning a collection off hides it from students again but keeps every collected form and all its LP. Turn it back on and everything is still there.
How Students Collect¶
On the Carta Collēctiōnis tab of their dossier, a student clicks a card and submits a form that matches its target, along with the phrase or sentence where they found it. The phrase must actually contain the form. The app parses the submission through Whitaker's Words and answers on the spot: a match is stored and counted; a non-match returns a "keep hunting" message, deliberately without revealing the form's other readings, since discovering that puellae is also dative is part of the game.
There are three kinds of card:
- Construction cards (9 of them, such as cum clause, purpose clause, ablative absolute, and indirect statement) take a whole phrase rather than a single word. Every word is parsed and the construction's surface signals are checked. The rules are deliberately generous; your Remove control is the backstop for false positives.
- Parse-it-yourself verb cards (11 of them, such as Perfect Verbs, Future Verbs, the subjunctive tenses, and forms of sum) also require the student to identify the form's person and number. Their parse has to agree with a Whitaker reading of the form.
- Locked cards keep their identity secret. Until unlocked, a card shows a face-down back and a
???name; only the grammar target, that is, what to hunt for, is visible. The reveal is the payoff.
Several anti-gaming guardrails run automatically: duplicate forms are rejected per card (macrons, capitalization, and i/j or u/v spelling do not create a "new" form); most cards accept at most 3 forms built on the same lemma; and accepted submissions are throttled to 15 per minute per operative.
Progression and LP¶
For a standard earn card, the number of verified forms drives everything:
| Forms collected | What happens |
|---|---|
| 25 | +100 LP |
| 50 | +100 LP and the card unlocks: art and name revealed |
| 100 | +100 LP |
| 150 | +50 LP |
| 200 | +50 LP and the card goes foil |
That is a maximum of 400 LP per card. Two small-inventory cards, Demonstrative Adjectives and Pronouns, run a compressed track instead, because there are only so many forms of hic and ille: milestones at 10, 20, and 40 forms (100, 100, and 200 LP), unlock at 20, foil at 40, and no per-lemma cap. Each card shows its own thresholds on its progress bar.
Carta LP counts toward the operative's total LP and level math, and appears as its own Carta Collēctiōnis line in the dossier's LP Breakdown.
Managing Cards on the Operative Manage Page¶
The Carta Collēctiōnis tab on any operative's manage page gives you:
- Per-card progress table: every enabled card with its form count, LP, and unlock or foil state, plus the operative's owned special cards.
- Grant a special card: pick from the dropdown of ungranted Special Unlock cards and click Grant card. Undo with Take back on the card's row.
- Foil a special: starters and granted specials can be upgraded to foil, and downgraded again, at your discretion. Specials have no collection track, so foil there is purely an honor you bestow.
- Recent submissions with Remove: the operative's latest collected forms, each with its source phrase and a Remove control. Because counts, LP, and unlock and foil state are all derived from the stored forms, removing a bogus submission self-corrects everything, with no cleanup math on your part.
Spot-checking honesty
Each stored form carries the phrase the student said it came from. Skim the recent-submissions list occasionally. If a source looks invented, Remove the form and have a word.
Questions or bugs: lapis@practomime.com. Include your cohort name and an operative code if relevant.