Yay!, Bee, See

bsittler recently wrote some software for use by his daughter on her XO. It runs inside the Browse activity, either locally using a "file:" URI or over the network. He released the software to the public domain and packaged it along with scaled-down 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.

Many of the letter-image associations were inspired by Dr. Seuss's ABC.

	Desktop 1600×1200	OLPC XO-1 1200×900
Hosted Applications	Yay!, Bee, See	Yay!, Bee, See
Source Archives	15 MiB ZIP	4 MiB ZIP
Collections		Yay-Bee-See-10.xol
Activity Bundles		Yay!BeeSee-2.xo

After installation

An initial click is needed to move input focus to the input area in the upper-right-hand part of the page.

Press View | Zoom out (the "-" magnification icon) three times (to reach a 1:1 JPEG:screen pixel ratio) and then View | Fullscreen for the best experience.

Activity bundle

User:Wade has rewritten Yay! Bee See as a standard Sugar activity and released the Python source under GPL. The bundle is located here: [1] It can be downloaded using the Browse activity.

Details

bsittler 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 found on Wikipedia or in the Wikimedia Commons. Refer to the source code for full copyright information for the associated images.

Blog post about the application

More recently, Samuel Klein packaged it as a Collection: Yay-Bee-See-2.xol; this was subsequently slightly updated by bsittler and is now Yay-Bee-See-10.xol

bsittler recommends SIL's recently released free Andika Basic font for the small type.

And either that, or Magenta's free MgOpen Cosmetica font for the large type.

Story

bsittler's daughter has been enjoying her XO-1 from 2007's G1G1 program much more than expected (originally he intended to wait until she was older and literate to introduce her to the XO-1, 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. 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 he thought he 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.)

Changelog

Collection Changelog

v10 

added title; improved browser compatibility; works as .html, .xml and .xhtml; changed some colors —User:bsittler

v9 

deferred updates work a lot better now; changed text color for the letter U —User:bsittler

v8 

translate Japanese and Latin descriptions to English, and fix attribution for 5.jpg —User:bsittler

v7 

fixed a javascript error when single quote key is pressed; low line (_) is no longer a letter —User:bsittler

v6 

improved some color combinations, and now we ignore keypresses involving midifers other than shift —User:bsittler

v5 

removed the seizure-inducing flashing when holding down a letter; use a neutral gray background rather than white. —User:bsittler

v4 

added a license summary in LICENSE, as suggested by User:Sj. —User:bsittler

v3 

switched to smaller image files (1200x900 maximum dimensions, JPEG quality factor 70); clarified licensing (HTML is in the Public Domain; images are covered variously by FDL 1.2+, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA (including one cc-by-sa-2.0-de), and CC-SA licenses; see the comments inside the <style> block in yay-bee-see.html for details. —User:bsittler

v2 

added LICENSE and README files, fixed info file for bundle. —User:Sj

Activity Bundle Changelog

T.B.D.