Making Plurals

Okay, I was recently presented with an excuse to use Rev when my kids (eight year-olds) brought home a bit of language arts homework that they didn't understand on plural form construction.

Here's how the worksheet presented things:



A word that means one of something is singular. A word that means more than one is plural. Most singular words are made plural by adding s. Most words that end in s, ss, x, ch, and sh are made plural by adding es. Form the plural of each word below by adding s or es.


button_____

boss_____

wish_____

robot_____

clock_____

circus_____.


BORING! There are no illustrating examples. This presentation earns a huge FAIL from an instructional design perspective. My little boy was very frustrated. So, I dusted off my brain and tried to remember what little I used to know about scripting to try to come up with something better. Here is the Mac OSX result and here is the Windows result (I don't know if the latter works as I don't have a PC to try it on).

What I did.

It's clear that a few examples were needed for demonstration purposes. It also seemed reasonable to have them do more than 6 sample problems (so I did 12 instead). I decided to use two different typefaces: one for instructions/presentation/rule articulation and a second for examples/problems. Since I was short on originality, I decided once again to use a chalkboard motif, which makes the first font choice fitting: Chalkboard (on the Mac). Chalkboard was selected less for its name than for the fact that it looks like the sort of printing that children are taught: simple lines, no serifs, no funny-looking 'a's like the one I just typed. As California's third grade curriculum also introduces cursive writing at this level, my second font was a strange thing called #PilGi, which was the closest thing I could find to a cursive handwriting font pre-installed on my Mac. The chalkboard image I found after a quick search for public domain clipart although I could also have just gone and photographed an actual chalkboard (they really do still exist!).

Probably the most time consuming aspect of this project was turning all the text into images instead of using Rev's built-in field objects. Even where the same font exists on, say, both the Mac and Windows, you cannot be assured that it will look the same on both (spacing will be very different), thus as I wanted things to look the same, all text had to be turned into images, and transparent PNGs at that (so the chalkboard would show through). I fired up GraphicConverter, but (a) it's been increasingly wonky with each new release, and (b) I noticed right away that text at really large point sizes (I think for the title screen, it's something like 120 points) is horribly pixellated, so I needed to use a program that had some Photoshop-like filter features. GIMP, a free open-source software program with Photoshop-like capabilities, was suggested. I don't know how GIMP is on Linux or Windows, but the Mac version kinda sucks, although I've been told it sucks less than it formerly did. On the Mac, GIMP requires the X11 environment (instructions are on the website), and it does not look like a standard Mac app (the accelerator key is control and not the apple key; the application's menu bar is not anchored to the top like it's supposed to be but is instead attached to the document window). But, hey -- it's free and I managed!

The first few screens are timed presentations of information (the rules and examples). Timed means using the "wait" command. Alot. Well, turns out that this can sometimes cause problems, and so I got chewed out over using it ;-) But, as I couldn't figure another way of doing the same thing, I compromised and used "wait with messages" (but, to be honest, even that still caused problems with the revlet version -- the web deployable one). However, the Mac version worked and, as my kids needed it this week and not next year, good enough will have to suffice.

On to the drill-and-kill! One of the things I didn't like about the kids' handout was the presentation of the rule and the exception. Even in print, I think I would have tried to separate the two so that it was clear there were two states or cases or rules -- you either add "s" or you add "es". I think it should have been two separate paragraphs to avoid the whole Hamlet's "words, words, words..." phenomenon. So, for the testing component I presented rule #1 (most words take an "s") on the left in its own box-demarcation, and rule #2 similarly on the right. Users are presented with three nouns per screen followed by an "s" and an "es" button and told to click on the appropriate one.

Are they dead yet? So far, I hadn't done much to mitigate the BORING! factor. So, I went back and added sound (text-to-speech; the revSpeak command [side rant: why couldn't they have just used "speak"?!!]) for the presentation and the instructions. Using buttons for testing meant nothing had to be dragged around on-screen by little uncoordinated hands using computer mice that are wayyyy too big for them. As an added bonus, kids LOVE to click buttons (watch one in the elevator some time; my kids fight over who gets to press which button). If the appropriate button is selected, an applause sound is played and a dialogue box thrown up which confirms that the child has chosen the appropriate ending. If the wrong button is selected, a goofy 'you lose' kind of sound is played ("play audioclip" command) and a dialogue box appears telling the child that this was not the correct choice, what the correct plural is, and why. This drove my husband batty, all that dialogue box confirmation, but kids aren't adults and, well, it's another button they get to click! I also then (with more "wait" commands) try to subtly hilite the appropriate rule box, but I'm not certain that it's not too subtle. At the end, the student's percentage rate correct is shown.

What went right.

It didn't take too long to find royalty-free or public domain images and sounds (I think I paid $10 for the you-lose sound but I liked it and didn't want to spend a half-hour looking for something public domain). "Wait" didn't screw up anything on the Mac side. I managed not to do anything terribly stupid. The kids actually liked it (in fact, I finally had to shoo them away, saying "let mommy finish it!!!). I actually finished it.

What went wrong.

"Wait" screwed up the revlet. Because I didn't script it terribly efficiently, writing the "yea" and "boo" buttons only once and using "the target" to exhibit the appropriate behavior, at some point I ended up having to go through all 12 sets of buttons to see where I forgot to increment the counter for things like moving to the next screen and getting the right math with respect to percentage of correct choices. Oh well. I lived to tell the tale.

What I'd do differently.

Use "the target". Randomize the presentation of the 12 problem/words in the testing area. Maybe make the cursive text on the second screen larger. Find a better cursive handwriting font. Pay somebody to tell me how to get around the "wait" problem. ;-)

New Educational Game Made in Revolution

Recently-released TwistAWord is a new educational game made with Revolution and indicative of what a person can do with a little time one their hands (well, okay, maybe more than a little time).


It is advertised as a fun word game for children from 8 to 88 years (and up)... Cool design, funny sound effects and a competitive element make improving your language skills a treat! . TwistAWord utilizes a corkboard and paper scrap motif; its object is for the player to correctly assemble a phrase's words from the presented scrambled order. Hints can be requested:



Four levels are supported as are phrases in eight languages (Catalonian, Danish, English, French, German, Latin, Portuguese or Spanish). The game is visually appealing and, had I not turned my sound down, no doubt my children would have excited by the game's sound effects.

If you are wondering whether you as a normal human being (e.g., non-programmer) could make something similar, the creator of TwistAWord described its development as thus The scripting is laborious, tedious, but not very complicated, although I used a few tricks one might not immediately think of... The basics of the game are still relatively simple.

TwistAWord is available for Windows or Mac OS X, and you can download a trial version which will quit after ten minutes of play. For a limited time, it is also available at a 33% discount for a total purchase price of slightly less than US$15.

Rev Media Free; Web-deployable Stacks!

This is really awesome news! Check it out!!

From the press release:

New, Free and Accessible Web Platform Launched

WEDNESDAY 22ND JULY 2009

New revMedia 4.0 Public Alpha Test Version Available Today
World's easiest programming language launches on the Web

EDINBURGH (July 22) – The world’s easiest programming language today launched on the Web with the debut of a free "alpha test" version of revMedia 4.0. This new version of the company's popular cross-platform development tool can now deploy to all major browsers on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Users can use revMedia's English-like programming language, revTalk, to write applications in less time and with less effort than traditional, more costly Web development tools.

The revWeb authoring environment and revTalk are modern descendents of natural-language programming technologies such as SmallTalk, Apple's HyperCard, AppleScript, and Adobe Director Lingo.

"HyperCard was one of the original inspirations for the Web." said Robert Cailliau, who co-developed the World Wide Web along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. Robert continued, "Today the Web can finally reach its full potential with a modern, powerful development language that honors the best ideas from that original concept."
Cailliau adds, "You can be a total beginner and still produce impressive software quickly. I use revTalk for all my coding needs, and know it goes far beyond programming 'for the rest of us.' Professionals will appreciate the speed with which they can build sophisticated solutions. It is a complete platform that gives you access to the entire Web, plus desktop and even server."

The technology is ground-breaking because the same, accessible language can be used wherever users wish to present their work. Previously, an alphabet soup of different languages and conflicting syntax had to be employed to create full solutions.
revMedia is a fully featured authoring tool that includes an integrated development environment (IDE) for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The product supports popular multimedia formats, vector graphics, powerful visual effects, drop shadows, OS-native look-and-feel, or interfaces with a completely custom skin. revTalk's unique chunk expressions make it easy to process text or crunch data. And for professional programmers, revTalk includes advanced features like object-oriented behaviors and multi-dimensional arrays.

Registration for the revMedia alpha is free and open to everyone. The final shipping version of revMedia will also be free. Users can upgrade to revStudio or revEnterprise if they need access to an advanced tool set, or to on-Rev to host server applications. The company will shortly be introducing a freely available, user-installable server language as part of its strategy to provide a complete English-like development platform for desktop, Web and servers.

The alpha test is available from http://revmedia.runrev.com

About Revolution:
_Revolution enables users to create applications using the platform of their choice and deploy to virtually every desktop computer in use today. Unlike other programming languages which rely on obscure symbols and complicated structures, Revolution uses plainly understood words and phrases for most of its operations. Casual users can ramp up quickly while advanced users save time by writing up to 90% less code than they would in a traditional language.

About RunRev:
Founded in 1997, RunRev focuses on bringing user-centric software development to all major platforms: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Unix. The company is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. For more information on Runtime Revolution, please visit the company on the Web at

http://www.runrev.com

Contact details
For more information or to arrange a review, contact:

Kevin Miller
phone +44 (0) 870 747 1165
email support@runrev.com
You may write to us at
RunRev
25A Thistle Street Lane South West
Edinburgh, Scotland EH2 1EW.

RunRev is a trading name of Runtime Revolution Ltd. All trademarks are the property of their respective owner

A Somber Good-bye...

First, a heartfelt good-bye...


Early Hypercard adopter/book writer and ever so helpful Revolutionary Eric Chatonet passed away last week from a sudden stroke. He was I believe 62, though you'd never know it from the incredible energy displayed in churning out Rev tutorials and example stacks... I never had the opportunity to meet him in person but in email and list exchanges he was one of the most kind, funny and humble persons you could ever hope to meet.



Needless to say, the Revolution community is stunned and saddened by his loss and wish his family the best as they and we mourn his loss.



RIP Eric.

Computers in the Schools, Take 2.

I have a wonderful friend for whom I do writing, civil rights and consulting work, and who has asked me to work on drafting an Op-Ed piece for a major southern California newspaper on the issue of educational reform.


And, well, we have a disagreement on how best to cover it. So, I will rewrite for him but publish my version here.


I feel very strongly about pumping in another untold millions of public dollars into computers for schools that is almost certainly entirely wasted and wrong-headed because of the education industry's refusal to require basic computer literacy from teacher ed candidates.


My take is below.

====================================



Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and somehow expecting the outcome to be different.


This recently-seen sig file on a “news for nerds” website is alarmingly apropos with respect to ongoing efforts at educational reform. Doing the same thing over and over... such as dumping untold billions of dollars into computers for schools – been there, done that, in the Clinton Administration, a decade ago. It was a failure then, and, if president-elect Obama's call to have a do-over succeeds, it's likely to be a failure now, at a time in which the public kitty increasingly cannot afford any more ill-conceived failures.


Larry Cuban has written a damning indictment of this entitled “Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom.” His sobering analysis concluded that, among a host of factors, the need for stability trumping badly-needed rapid change and the neglect of politicians to ask why computers were even needed in the classroom contributed substantially to the stunning lack of return on the public's considerable investment. Like the banking and auto industry failures seen recently, the senseless dumping of computers into education without requiring follow-through from educators is a compelling demonstration of what happens when you have an insular body of professionals in a failing industry: power divorced from competence and reality; a power invested heavily in believing that, somehow, this time will be different despite doing nothing different.


Here's why this time probably won't be different. By 1984, as a society, we knew we were at the birth of the personal computer revolution. Certainly by the 1990s we knew it was a force to be reckoned with, especially in the field of education. But, in 2009, those who educate the educators will continue to fail to recognize the need to incorporate meaningful technology training in teacher preparation programs, meaning that all those shiny new computers in K-12 classrooms will continue to go largely unused -- at a price tag in the billions of public dollars, making them one heck of an expensive and utterly useless educational bailout package.


As an industry, education is incredibly insular – it recognizes little that is not internally validated. This is the industry which gave us our current constructivist approach to education in which, when taken literally, a central pillar of faith is that there is no such thing as objective truth or reality. Tell that to the programmer who needs his program to compile and later not unintentionally blow up a manned spacecraft; tell that to the engineer whose building needs to withstand an earthquake, or the doctor who needs to be able to figure out whether you've got cancer or merely indigestion. The real world and its problems are are based in objective reality and require that, when one “solution” isn't producing the desired results, you need to find another solution, and not drag your feet with your head in the sand.


The quality of our public education system is the predictor of whether or not the next generation will succeed or fail in taking charge of this country; whether we will continue to be a major world power or slide intellectually behind third-world countries. If we wish to be a competitor in the 21st century's global arena, our teaching and learning practices need to embrace 21st century tools and make dramatic changes to those practices in a timeframe which doesn't exceed a decade or more.


Education's insularity betrays our considerable investment in what is perhaps our greatest national product, namely, the human and social capital potentially produced by our schools. With respect to computers in the schools, that betrayal comes in the form of teacher education programs that comfortably ignore the personal computer revolution. Study after study pointedly documents that educators, both K-12 and in higher education, are, at best, casual, timid users of computer technologies: most only use those software programs pre-installed on their computers, namely, an office suite, email and web browser programs.


As a result, today's teacher preparation programs encourage a belief system that turns computers into incredibly expensive digital typewriters. Like the craftsman with only a hammer in his toolbox, educators tend to to define educational computer technology implementation in terms of the few, mostly inappropriate, software programs they already know how to use. This leads to such classroom insanity as making third-grade students input their vocabulary words into PowerPoint presentations or using a word processing program to type up stories or math word problems (by the way, these are actual examples of how computer technologies have been implemented in K-12; just how many billions of dollars would you estimate that is worth?).


Would we accept the bailout of the banks if they continued making the same risky loans? Are we in favor of funding a 'get out of bankruptcy court free' pass to automakers if they insist on not doing anything different than the same practices that got them into the financial morass they're in? Of course not – so why should education be any different?


Here's why we might as well be smoking the dollars we're insensibly burning: Thomas Alva Edison – not normally known as an imbecile – once famously predicted that the motion picture would lead to the death of the textbook. Dead Wrong. Radio, too, was predicted to become the airwaves of education. Didn't happen. Television (and, now, computer technologies used for distance learning) was supposed to largely eliminate the need for local classrooms and, well, that hasn't happened either.


Each novel technology has come with claims of revolutionizing education, claims that never quite translate into reality due at least in part to the inability of educators to critically examine the new technology, understand it, and learn how to effectively utilize it. It seems a remarkably lazy assumption that a radically new technology doesn't require the adoption of a new set of educational practices, and yet that has been education's response to the government's largesse. This intransigence to implement meaningful change ignores the wealth of literature which shows the educational benefits of computer technologies which utilize multiple media, interactivity, and customized tasks – the creation of such things by teachers which empowers both teacher and student. It is bafflingly unclear why, nearly a quarter century after the birth of the personal computer revolution, our nation's teachers still cannot fully realize the computer's benefits that were possible in 1987.


Like Barbie of old, ivory towers of teacher preparation programs cry that “programming's hard” and not something educators should have to learn. And however much we may want to sympathize that some of life's duties are, indeed, difficult, we need to realize that the reality of teachers being unable to create their own meaningful technology solutions means that the untold billions of dollars that have been – and will continue to be – spent on computers for the classroom is money we'd be better off spending on more janitors, nurses, teacher's aids, English language acquisition, and health, lunch and parenting programs.


And, of course, another factor frequently overlooked when reciting the 'we need more computers in the schools' mantra is that computer technologies are financial black holes that just keep growing. It's not sufficient to simply buy the machines – using and maintaining them requires the hiring of entire IT departments; additionally, there's software to purchase, training to provide (which, in the case of teachers, rarely happens), repair and replacement costs to shoulder. Technology is a hungry beast that requires constant and costly feeding.


Technology thus constitutes an entirely new set of budgetary requirements that unfortunately do not come with concommitant new sources of funding. As schools increasingly push their students to sell, sell, sell stuff that mostly nobody really wants to buy anyway, just to maintain basic services, and, at the same time, considerably increases homework loads just to make the No Child Left Behind folks happy with test scores, one wonders when exactly it is that a child gets to simply be a child. Just how many programs in the arts and vocational areas have been sacrificed to feed the federally-mandated technology beast? And at what cost to society? In this era of educational reform, have we forgotten the value of such things as creativity, play and imagination – three very important skill sets that helped some really innovative people born a half century or more ago to develop the personal computer, or take us to the moon, the solar system and beyond?


Social critic Neil Postman has observed that technological change is never value-free, nor are its effects additive – new technologies completely transform the social landscape with hidden value shifts that aren't well understood (or, indeed, are altogether ignored) in society's head-long rush to embrace the new technology as an unqualified a priori good. Were he alive today, Postman might well admonish us that, when gigabytes of storage, high bandwidth capacities, and megaherz processor clock speeds became the objects of desire, we unwittingly choose to value those things above the things that previously mattered to us -- helping children understand the process of negotiation by which we avoid nasty bullying to get what we want; fostering an environment which supports the creative and collaborative process by which we invent new things; nurturing good citizenship and an understanding of fair play and the civic principles for which this country stands.


And for what exactly???

Recently seen on Slashdot...

...power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.

Revolution Media US$39!!

Revolution Media is being offered for a limited time for the fantastic price of $39!

Until November 30, you can save $10 off the normal download price of $49.

What is Rev Media? Rev Media has nearly all of the most important features of the full-blown Revolution product lines with the exception of being able to compile a standalone executable file. However, anything created with Media will run on all supported platforms (meaning, most importantly, Mac and Windows) via the freely-downloadable Media stack player (which is similar to the functionality provided by Hyperstudio).

From the company's website:

Revolution Media is the fun and creative, do-anything software construction kit everyone can afford. Learn programming logic, build exciting games, make quick work of projects large and small, and construct compelling multimedia experiences using drag-and-drop interface elements and the world's easiest language.

The company touts as advantage #1 that you can "learn programming" using Media. But, inasmuch as the "P" word tends to scare off alot of people who envision learning some nasty systems programming language featuring lots of ugly dot.syntax.unreadable.incomprehensible.crap, it should be noted that Media comes with the following out of the box:

* Templates to help automate the production of games, kiosks, portfolios and slide-shows
* 27 Quick-start tutorials and videos on how to use Media
* 78 Pre-built sample scripts to copy-paste into your own projects
* 13 Example stacks for you to use, modify, and take apart
* 377 page PDF User's Guide
* Full-featured, easy to learn English-like scripting language

Rev Media imports a broad spectrum of media formats -- GIF, JPG, PNG (for images), WAV, AIF (etc. for audio, although weird sampling rates on WAV don't work well), and QuickTime -- and thus make the product ideal for rich media presentations.

If I didn't already own an Enterprise license, I'd take advantage of this offer pronto! This product offers so many more advantages (short of the included stock media) than Hyperstudio that I still fail to understand the death-grip the latter has on the education market (probably it's that the older people with Ph.D.'s in education remember how horrific learning to program used to be back in the medieval period that they simply shy away from anything that promotes the "P" word... but that doesn't mean that the rest of us need to be dinosaurs, right?!).