"Yay!, Bee, See" (ABC) software

[Ben Wiley Sittler]

Hi,

I have just joined this list and read through the archives, but could
not find anything similar. I also didn't find mention of anything
similar on the OLPC Wiki.

I recently wrote some software for use by my daughter on her OLPC. It
runs inside the Browse activity, either locally using a "file:" URI or
over the network. I don't know whether it will be of interest to
anyone else, but I have released the software to the public domain and
packaged it along with scaled-down (1600x1200 or less) copies of some
public-domain images and some copyrighted-but-free-to-redistribute
images under GFDL, and various Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike, Attribution, and Share Alike licenses. Individual attribution
for each image is included in the application source code.

overview:

I wrote some software using DHTML (JavaScript, HTML and CSS.) It's to
help learn letters and numbers, and is intended to be used with adult
supervision and involvement. It is fairly easy to customize it to use
different images and support different alphabets simply by editing the
contents of the <style> element in the HTML file.

The software is very, very, very simple — it just echoes typed letters
and numbers in a large, colorful font and shows a somewhat-relevant
background image for each one. The images are various freely-usable
ones I found on Wikipedia or in the Wikimedia Commons. View source
code for full copyright information for the associated images.

online version of the "Yay!, Bee, See" application:

http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see.html

an archive of the application (ZIP, ~15 MiB) including all images:

http://xent.com/~bsittler/yay-bee-see.zip

blog post about it:

http://bsittler.livejournal.com/15244.html

background:

My daughter (who turns two this week) has been enjoying her OLPC from
last year's G1G1 program much more than I expected she would
(originally I intended to wait until she was older and literate to
introduce her to the OLPC, but she seemed to treat it as a favorite
toy starting around the age of 18 months.) She likes the Record
activity (she calls it "Waving hand" and uses it like a mirror-image
mirror,) Skype (not bundled, but she uses it to talk to and see
far-away family,) and listening to music (theclassicalstation.org).
She also likes pressing buttons, rotating the "ears" and screen, and
opening and closing the laptop. However, she seems somewhat frustrated
by not being able to do things on it for herself (or as she puts it,
"do it self!",) so I thought I might write a small program where her
keypresses give some feedback, and help reinforce her interest in the
digits and letters of the alphabet (she loves being read to and
recognizes many letters and digits, but does not seem to understand
reading yet.)

-Ben