From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed May 22 2002 - 19:27:38 MDT
>From: J.W. Harris (index@cox.net)
Date: Wed May 15 2002 - 11:28:34 MDT
Does anyone know of any open source programs
(preferably linux-based) to teach toddlers reading?>
Here are some options: Get an old Amiga system for
your kid. You can find some really powerful,
full-blown systems on E-Bay. The older systems -
1.2/1.3 Amiga OS (thru 1990) - came with the
"translator" library - I believe that's the correct
designation. This enabled programs that called it to
speak, and the included MicroSoft BASIC could call
this library directly or via it's internal commands.
I wrote several programs for kids that used it way
back when.
The OS itself during that period included a "say"
utility. You could click on the icon and a Say window
would appear and anything you typed in would be spoken
aloud. Or, assuming you had set your paths correctly,
you could simply type "say" in a Command Line
Interface window or Shell, followed by parameters,
text, or files to be read aloud. The pronunciation
was rather robotic, but the degree of naturalness was
a parameter along with pitch and reading speed. Other
parties later offered software - usually freeware
still available - to customize the library to use
sampled voices of a better phoneme set.
An old Amiga system is probably better suited to a
young kid than anything currently out there -
especially Windoze. There were thousands of free
early-learning and general educational programs -
generally still available on various sites. (Amigas -
clones, anyway - are still being manufactured, BTW,
last time I checked.)
LOGO - the programming language - is good for kids of
any age. That's what it was designed for at Minsky's
AI lab - to help kids build cognitive skills. There's
an excellent book about it by the guy primarily
responsible, Seymour Pappert, called "Mindstorms."
There were both a commercial and several freeware
versions of LOGO available on the Amiga, but it was
available on just about every other platform as well.
An option to buying an Amiga is to run the excellent
Amiga emulator - actually there are several, all
freeware - on your LINUX box. You will probably have
to buy the ROMs, as this is property of Amiga, Inc.,
or buy an old Amiga that already has them and then you
can use various utilities to port them over from
hardware to a software file for your LINUX system.
I'm not certain whether you would be able to use the
speech from the LINUX system. Supposedly, there is
support for the Amiga sound via emulation, but I know
that there are too many possibilities out there to
guarantee anything on a given system.
The Glenn Doman books have a lot of material that
could be emulated on your computer. For example, in
math, Doman has demonstrated that a normal baby can be
quickly taught to recognize sets of up to 100 random
items. That is, the baby knows just by looking that
there are 89 items and not 88 or 90. Normally, we
never get trained in that skill when we have the
mallability available, so we're restricted to tiny
groups of up to seven or nine, for most adults.
Similarly, most people never develop perfect pitch
because they never got the feedback early on. Yet
anyone without serious brain damage could tell you
that something was a middle C, or a slightly flat
middle C - say 252Hz - if they got the feedback as a
young child. Similarly for a host of other perceptual
skills, such as predicting motion paths or recognizing
elapsed time.
You might want to check out the Montessori equipment
as well. A complete set of the early childhood
equipment costs about $20,000 new from the one and
only source - Nienhuis, out of Holland, but you may be
able to find a school that has folded that will sell
it at pennies on the dollar. Or, there are the
Hainstock Montessori at Home series of books, which
tell you how to construct analogues of the official
equipment out of household items.
Have fun...
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