We will meet in Sitterson 011 from 3:30 to 5pm.
I have created a page on Piazza for questions and annoucements. Sign yourself up.
This is going to be a very biased view of web development; namely mine. But I'm currently happy with the approach I am using and think others may be also. We will be using:
Ideally before the first meeting you will have completed the following.
Maze Day is for visually impaired and blind students in grades K-12, their parents and teachers. Your students will enjoy fun and educational computer applications developed especially for them. UNC students will learn how well their accessible applications work with real users. And everyone will have a good time!
We plan to have a wide variety of accessible fun, educational, and exercise activities.
Lunch will be provided. Free!
To register, fill out the form below or email Missy Wood wood@cs.unc.edu or Diane Brauner dianebrauner@me.com. Also, please have parents fill out the photo consent form (English or Spanish). We will only include your children in photographs of the event with your permission.
In order for students to receive a tee shirt, registration must be submitted by Monday April 11th.
We have limited funding for travel grants for groups who could not otherwise attend. Email Missy Wood wood@cs.unc.edu for more information.
]]>These audio enhanced books are designed for reading in iBooks.
These games are playable using Google Chrome only.
]]>Maze Day is for visually impaired and blind students in grades K-12, their parents and teachers. Your students will enjoy fun and educational computer applications developed especially for them. UNC students will learn how well their accessible applications work with real users. And everyone will have a good time!
We plan to have a wide variety of accessible fun, educational, and exercise activities.
Lunch will be provided. Free!
To register, fill out the form below or email Missy Wood wood@cs.unc.edu or Diane Brauner dianebrauner@me.com. Also, please have parents fill out the photo consent form (English or Spanish). We will only include your children in photographs of the event with your permission.
In order for students to receive a tee shirt, registration must be submitted by Monday April 13th.
We have limited funding for travel grants for groups who could not otherwise attend. Email Missy Wood wood@cs.unc.edu for more information.
Maze Day Registration is closed.
]]>Maze Day is for visually impaired and blind students in grades K-12, their parents and teachers. Your students will enjoy fun and educational computer applications developed especially for them. UNC students will learn how well their accessible applications work with real users. And everyone will have a good time!
We plan to have a wide variety of accessible fun, educational, and exercise activities.
Lunch will be provided. Free!
To register, fill out the form below or email Missy Wood wood@cs.unc.edu or Diane Brauner dianebrauner@me.com. Also, please have parents fill out the photo consent form (English or Spanish). We will only include your children in photographs of the event with your permission.
We have limited funding for travel grants for groups who could not otherwise attend. Email Missy Wood wood@cs.unc.edu for more information.
Maze Day Registration is closed.
]]>sudo apt-get install network-manager-vpnc.Give it a name such as UNC. Then fill in the fields like this:
Gateway: vpn.unc.edu
User name: your onyen
User password: your onyen password
Group name: secret from unc help page
Group password: secret from unc help page
The italicized values above are super secret values that only you and the Help page know. Leave all the other values at their defaults. Click Save....
Now you should be able to activate the VPN whenever you need it by right clicking on the network icon and choosing VPN Connections → UNC.
]]>I can do a simple drag and drop interface for teachers to create books and provide a variety of access methods to accommodate kids with a different disabilities.
To make it more interesting I'd like to make this web service stateless. Hosting Tar Heel Reader has been great but administering a site with tons of user data is no fun. I don't want to store any of the media they use in their books on our servers. I can do that, I'm pretty sure, with Dropbox. But if I'm going to not store their media why store anything?
Experiments have convinced me that I should be able to store their book in the appcache in a modern browser. Appcache is the html5 machinery designed to enable offline operation. It looks like after they import the content into their appcache they shouldn't ever need to access our server again. This will be great for teachers who don't have wireless access in their schools; they just load up the "app" and go. By bookmarking the URL on their "home screen" on mobile devices, it should work pretty much like a conventional app.
They shouldn't need to access our server again unless... they want share their creation with someone else, or back it up; for that they need some representation that they can easily export and import. It's only a small text file (json format) describing the URL, positioning and response of the various media.
On desktop browsers I can just trigger a download dialog from my client-side javascript and have them save the json file. Later they can post that file to my server to recreate the book or load it onto another machine.
But what about tablets and phones? Especially iOS devices. How can they save and share their creation?
Approaches I've considered:
Does anyone have suggestions for how my iOS users could easily save and share this data? You'll have to email me, my comments were 99% spam so I turned them off.
Update: With the Dropbox App for iOS installed, Safari will offer Save to Dropbox for certain mimetypes. Unfortunately application/octet-stream isn't one of them. Anyway, I think I can stringify my object to json then construct a data url with some random mimetype and force a save dialog. Not nearly as pretty as having it all in the URL but it seems like a potential work around.
]]>In this game concept, children will play individually wearing headphones and speaking into a high-quality microphone. We will feed microphone signal into the headphones along with the computer audio so they can hear themselves. Each child will complete multiple rounds depending on their interest and skill. In each round, the child will hear a simple musical phrase one or more times. Then they will imitate what they heard by speaking or singing the music along with the computer. They might say “la la” or “do re mi” for piano notes, or “ratatat boom” for drums; whatever they use will be fine.
We will record the sounds they make and assign points by the accuracy of their timing and possibly their pitch. After several rounds, we'll automatically combine their recordings into a performance in which they hear themselves sing multiple parts. I think they'll love this and will want to record yet more phrases. The most interested and talented children might be invited to create their own riffs to overlay the multiple parts.
Later in the day, perhaps at lunch time, we could play the full virtual choir singing an entire piece. If we really go crazy we could include an animated display of the children singing their parts. I think it might be particularly effective to start with one small child doing a simple melody and gradually adding more children and parts.
I fantasize that I can handle the recording, time alignment, pitch matching, and multitrack playback but I really need help with the music.
We need a polyphonic round with many simple phrases that combine into a performance that is greater than the sum of its parts. Ideally the phrases could go together in multiple ways. More than Row Row Row but not too hard. Any ideas?
]]>Note this isn't yet ready for production; it will move to the tarheelreader.org after the testing is done. I can't guarrantee that anything you create with this testing version will make it into the final version.
New features include:
Maze Day is for visually impaired and blind students in grades K-12, their parents and teachers. Your students will enjoy fun and educational computer applications developed especially for them. UNC students will learn how well their accessible applications work with real users. And everyone will have a good time!
We plan to have a wide variety of accessible fun, educational, and exercise activities. We will be especially featuring a new collection of games hosted on our web site and accessible from any computer connected to the internet.
Lunch will be provided. Free!
To register, fill out the form below or email Missy Wood wood@cs.unc.edu or Diane Brauner dianebrauner@embarqmail.com. Also, please have parents fill out the photo consent form (English or Spanish). We will only include your children in photographs of the event with your permission.
We have limited funding for travel grants for groups who could not otherwise attend. Email Missy Wood wood@cs.unc.edu for more information.
]]>