[jQuery] Community project? Help revive the Lakota language
Hi folks,
I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but I have a
potential community project which could show off jQuery's chops, and
help some people out at the same time.
Here's the background: Through my blog I've ended up in contact with
someone who is working on helping to teach the Lakota language to
kids. Her most recent project was to create a Lakota version of
Scrabble, a story which was written up in a few newspaper articles,
and which I blogged about (that's how I ended up meeting her).
We ended up talking a bit about her work, and she was interested in
developing web-based games for kids to play and learn from. The first
idea she mentioned was flash cards. (I did mess around a bit with some
code a flash card quiz, but I've been too busy to get it working quite
yet.)
I had just read Yehuda's plan for building demos with a "wow" factor,
and it got me thinking: what if we built demos that also worked as
language teaching tools? We could build quizzes and games that might
appeal to kids. Clearly the wow factor is motivational for kids. It's
a good cause, and everybody knows that there's no tester as efficient
at pounding an application into oblivion as a kid :)
For those that are interested, a couple of issues come to mind:
* It would probably be best to keep it as simple as possible: JSON for
the vocabulary data, jQuery for the games, and the cookie plugin for
things like keeping track of scores. This would mean that server side
stuff wouldn't be necessary. Thus, for the facilitator, adding a new
module would just involve writing a new JSON file and possibly some
images, and then uploading a new folder by FTP.
* One key aspect would involve handling sound recordings of words (the
student clicks and image and hears the name, for instance). This is a
topic that I haven't really seen come up on this list much. Expertise
in this would be great.
* Lots of existing plugins could be used in this project -- the
rotating carousel that Stefen posted today, for instance, would be a
fun way for kids to "click the picture of the bird", etc.
I hope it's okay that I wrote up this little proposal here. There's so
much brainpower and creativity on this list, why not see if we can
harness it to help some folks out, and show the capabilities of this
amazing library in the process?
Another cool side effect would be the portability of the quizzes:
Javascript has great Unicode support, and since all the data would be
in JSON files, all the games would be portable to any language pair --
an open source language learning library.
Anyone interested?
Pilamaya (thanks!),
Pat Hall
Some relevant links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakota_language
Lakota is a Native American language of the Sioux family -- if you've
seen "Dances with Wolves," you've heard Lakota.
http://www.indian-affairs.org/languagepreservation.htm
A description of some of this group's previous work
http://blogamundo.net/dev/2006/03/27/flickr-for-language-learning/
Original blog post which resulted in a comment from Tammy Decoteau,
the project organizer
--
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