speed reading activity?

[david at lang.hm]

On Sat, 7 Jun 2008, Urko Fernandez wrote:

> There seems to be two problems for a speed reading activity in the XO.
> The first is that some of those technologies are patent encumbered, but
> it seems that the main technology or concept behind speed reading,
> called rapid serial visual presentation, it's either patent free or free
> of royalties. So writing an activity based on RSVP could be feasible.

the approach that I used was over 30 years ago, so if there is a patent on 
it it's either expired or invalid due to prior art.

> The second problem could be that this can be a battery drainer, the
> screen is constantly swapping words. I've written a flashcard activity*,
> and I've implemented a way to see the answer using RSVP; don't have a
> real XO (I'm developing using sugar-jhbuild under Ubuntu) but I could
> modify what I've coded to do a test activity to see how much battery
> reading a test that way consumes.

yes, it will prevent the system from going to sleet, but the current 
versions of the software can't put the system to sleep while keeping the 
screen running anyway, so it's not a short-term problem

it will eat up a little cpu to scroll the screen, but it should't be that 
bad (and in any case can be deemed an accdeptable trade-off for the 
capability.

> If speed reading activity is to be written, you could also take
> advantage of the screen size, because RSVP seems to be suited for small
> screens, like mobile phones and PDAs and the rest of the XO's screen
> could be used someway or another.

what I'm envisioning is the ability to define a window size (which would 
be much smaller then the XO screen size in most cases), the scroll rate, 
and the font size. it would then smoothly scroll the text through the 
window and then quiz the student for comprehention and calculate a wpm 
score (raw speed - penalties for missing comprehention questions)

this seems such a trivial (but useful) that I'm having trouble beliving 
that nobody has one already written.

David Lang

> Cheers,
>
> Urko
>
> *http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Assimilate
>
> On Sat, 2008-06-07 at 06:32 -0700, david at lang.hm wrote:
>> one of the things that got me started reading well was that at an early
>> age I went to a school that had a speed reading activity. it had light
>> cardstock sheets that you ran through a machine that moved them at the
>> appropriate speed through a ~4-5 line window and the student would take a
>> quiz on what they just read.
>>
>> I've been digging a little bit, but not finding anything like this
>> available for the XO.
>>
>> has anyone seen anything like this? if so could you point me at it?
>>
>> David Lang
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>
>