Re: [kidsgames] word familiarity

[pkienzle@kienzle.powernet.co.uk (Paul Kienzle)]

>The (kindof) answer to that is to have one person read the *entire*
>dictionary (just the root words at least) into a BIG sound file -
>and have people who want to contribute to the database cut out the
>word they want from that big file (or set of 26 big files).  I
>wonder how long it would take to read the dictionary like that?
>20,000 words - two seconds each?  Eleven hours.  I guess that's
>do-able if you have enough disk space.  One person could do it in
>a couple of weeks at one or two hours a night.
>
>Oh - but wait.  20,000 words is only the start of it.  My dictionary
>has "JUMP" - but not "JUMPED", "JUMPING" or "JUMPS".
>
><sigh>

You really do not want to paste word tokens together to synthesize
sentences.  The prosody will be totally wrong, and the result will
be hopelessly unintelligible.  A bad synthesizer will do as well.

Furthermore, flashing up the picture and then reading the word does
not make for a very exciting game.  It's better if you mix things up a
little bit.  For lletters, I recorded sentences like "T is for train;
tiger starts with T; that's a pretty angel fish."  And I'm in good
company.  We have a very compact version of Dr. Suess's ABC's wherein
each page has the form "Big X, little X, what begins with X? ...",
which I found too tedious to read to my son --- not at all like the
rest of Dr. Suess.  Then I chanced upon an original full-sized version,
and it was so much better.  Here, he breaks up the monotony by changing
the structure of the verse on some of the pages.  I really don't see
how a database can capture this sort of creativity.

>
>> -->So, even downscaling to words to a childs vocabulary, this is a
>> -->HUGE undertaking.
>> 
>> And the benefits, I hope, more than make up for it.  They say open source
>> ("freed" software) allows the developer's to "do it right".  So the
>> question is -- "Is building this database the RIGHT way to do it?"  If so
>> then I think we attempt it...  Future generations can fix it on the fly...
>> It is theirs TOO.
>
>Yes - this is an incredibly good idea - it would be a VERY useful
>resource - and doing it RIGHT is good.  But we keep coming back to
>the amount of effort required.

It still seems to me that the structure of the database should follow
from the demands of the games that are going to be using it.  Here are
my pet examples.  Can you add others?

Linux Letters and Numbers:
   a word, a picture, a recording of an "interesting" phrase.  
   E.g., "cow", a picture of a cow in a field, "cow starts with C".

Stickers:
   a word, a picture, a recording of the word, a "stamp" sound, and a
	"paint" sound
   E.g., "cow", a picture of a cow with transparent background, a
	recording of the word "cow", a recording of a cow mooing, and
	a loop recording of a field of cows which can be played back
	for the full duration of the paintbrush stroke.

Paul Kienzle
pkienzle@kienzle.powernet.co.uk


-
kidgames@smluc.org  -- To get off this list send "unsubscribe" in the
body of a message to majordomo@smluc.org