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

[Gary C Martin]

On 24 Nov 2008, at 17:21, Ben Wiley Sittler wrote:

> 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.

Seems a great addition for the younger age range :-)

I did notice that even on a high specced laptop (1.5Ghz, 2Gb ram,  
broadband connection) the background image was very slow to display  
(until it had been cached locally).

One suggestion, 1600x1200 seems a bit large (even as a max size). For  
the XO, 800x600 (max!) would seem to be a fair max image size to save  
nand space and keep image quality. The XO screen is capable of  
1200x900 in black/white, and 800x600 seems a reasonable number for  
it's colour resolution abilities:

	http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display

--Gary

> 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
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