PhoneticExplorer: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
m (→Design / Development Challenges: note tension between HIG conformance and portability) |
(→Development approach: added note about cross-platform portability) |
||
| Line 36: | Line 36: | ||
* Fill in the gaps |
* Fill in the gaps |
||
* Release early and often (as soon as presentable): don't get bogged down in comprehensiveness, complexity and advanced features |
* Release early and often (as soon as presentable): don't get bogged down in comprehensiveness, complexity and advanced features |
||
* [[OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines]]: |
|||
* Explore sharing ... share the tray? |
|||
** Sharing/collaboration: |
|||
| ⚫ | |||
*** Share the tray? |
|||
| ⚫ | |||
** OLPC-specific HIG features, like sharing and journal, should be implemented in a modular way so as to allow relatively easy replacement or removal when porting to other low-cost computing platforms. |
|||
==References== |
==References== |
||
Revision as of 14:36, 3 April 2008
Basic idea
A phonetics toy, allowing children basic exposure to sounds of the world's languages, via the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA - [[1]]).
The IPA symbols are displayed; user can click on a symbol and hear it pronounced.
Features
- sounds are organized into rows (e.g. nasals) and columns (e.g. bilabials) and other categories
- hover mouse over a symbol to see its full name
- click on a symbol to hear it pronounced (in context?)
- double-click a symbol to add it to your "tray" at the bottom of the screen
- click a "play" button next to the tray to play the sounds of the tray in sequence
- save your tray contents to the journal, tagged as "phonetic words" or something. Tagged as "words", "phonetic"
Future Directions
- could integrate to word list building, dictionary building, etc.
- special project: give kids a structure to build a mapping from their writing system to IPA symbols. Then they push the 'play' button for letters -> IPA -> audio transformation: instant feedback. (Idea from Paul Zwierzynski)
- This should have the advantage (compared to Speech / espeak) that it can be customized to minority languages by mother-tongue speakers of those languages.
Design / Development Challenges
- There is far more information that *could* be displayed than will fit on the screen.
- Scroll it? OK, if necessary.
- Display the broadest categories only, and drill down to get to the symbols? Not great for exploring.
- Display only most common symbols on main page, and drill down for less-common symbols?
- Finding reliable quality, copyright-unencumbered sound recordings
- Wikipedia seems to provide recordings in GNU Free Doc License; is the quality good, across the board?
- OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines:
- What does collaboration/sharing mean in this activity?
- Competing goals:
- conformance to OLPC-specific HIG
- portability to other low-cost computing platforms
Development approach
- Copy an existing activity like TamTamMini to make a grid of symbols linked to sounds
- Set up a few (half a dozen) sounds with symbols, names, sounds, grid layout. Start with consonants. Then vowels. Maybe never diacritics & suprasegmentals (until Graphite is ported to the XO?).
- User testing with children
- Fill in the gaps
- Release early and often (as soon as presentable): don't get bogged down in comprehensiveness, complexity and advanced features
- OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines:
- Sharing/collaboration:
- Share the tray?
- Go see what sharing looks like in other, similar activities. How do you avoid fighting over navigation control? First one in gets control?
- OLPC-specific HIG features, like sharing and journal, should be implemented in a modular way so as to allow relatively easy replacement or removal when porting to other low-cost computing platforms.
- Sharing/collaboration: