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

Ben Wiley Sittler bsittler at gmail.com
Mon Nov 24 19:31:07 EST 2008


yeah, i added a 1200x900 version with more agressive JPEG compression
which looks good both in color mode and in monochrome mode and is only
4 MiB or so:

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

hosted version:

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

does that seem any faster?

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> 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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>
>



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