Developer XO laptop loan or buy - Speakeasy project

[Lester Leong]

Chris,

Not negative at all. I have heard of this project when looking around
to see if there were any open-source projects that I could port, so
that I wouldn't have to start from scratch. I know there have also
been a few other microphone/speech-recognition approaches to
language-learning.

The issue with this approach is that I think it's a little overkill,
at least for now. What I'm trying to do is similar, but much simpler:
gamify language-learning but get rid of the complicated
speech-recognition stuff. My theory is that just hearing spoken
English and encouraging the child to follow along may be enough, at
least for a start.

I'm sure you've heard of Rosetta Stone. I've learned to speak Spanish
moderately well using it. I wanted to do something similar to this -
it utilizes flash cards and although it has a speech-recognition
element, this is not strictly required, and many people have learned
from it without a microphone. I agree that  you can't really learn
without practicing speech, but even with a mic and sophisticated
speech-recognition, there's only so much software can accomplish aside
from the "real thing" - practicing with real speakers.

I think it could just be as easy as having a collection of multimedia
and gamifying it. I thought of having a set of flashcards with audio -
then many things could be done with that. Audio to picture matching.
Finish the sentence. Multiplayer races. Pictures in a series to denote
context, etc. It could just be that simple. Would be really trivial to
implement as well. I even thought of implementing it as web served
pages so that the whole thing could exist in website form - in remote
locations without Internet, maybe the pages can be locally
stored/hosted.

Anyway, the reason I would like an XO is because I'd like to get a
feel for user interface, as well as the limitations of it, from the
very beginning. It would help guide design immensely.

Hope this helps,
Lester

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 9:35 PM, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Jun 11 2012, Lester Leong wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm trying to get this project off the ground:
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Speakeasy
>
> Have you considered joining forces with:
>
> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jsalsman/choose-your-reading-and-pronunciation-adventure
>
> ?  They seem to be very expert in language learning and speech recognition.
>
>> I would like to buy or, if possible, loan, an XO laptop for
>> development and testing. I live in Wantagh, NY, which is in Long
>> Island and reasonably close to the greater New York city area.
>>
>> Please let me know what I need to do to get this project off the ground!
>
> My advice would be that hardware and porting are not the difficult part
> of this project -- if you create software that teaches literacy well,
> porting it to the XO will be straightforward as long as it runs on top
> of Linux and X11.  (And even if it doesn't work on the XO's platform,
> there are so few good Free Software literacy software projects right
> now that someone else would probably volunteer to do the port for you!)
>
> The difficult part is actually designing and writing the code.  I think
> you should think more about that, write up your ideas (your wiki page
> currently contains no technical information at all!) and start seeing
> if the ideas work by running them on standard laptops.
>
> Sorry if this e-mail feels negative.  I think it's important to
> understand that good literacy software is possibly the most difficult
> type of software to write, yet also one of the most needed types in the
> world right now.  I think your effort will be most likely to succeed
> if you seek help from experts, and spend your time researching and
> experimenting; there's no need for an XO to do any of those things.
>
> - Chris.
> --
> Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>   <http://printf.net/>
> One Laptop Per Child