I met XO 2-3 years ago and I was involved in a project for XO. It's for the kids to practice oral English.
Given several vocabularies to the kids, ask them to pronounce it and we grade it :) The project involved porting an aged library from Windows to Linux and making a GUI for kids. No matter how well the grading is ... here is the current interface :)
So, kids can type in the vocabulary and speak to the XO... and XO tell them ... how well they are.
Here's a lovely video telling how they use it :)
OK. Kids are interested... So Why not making them more interested ^^? Stuffs come to my mind ... can we have a pretty face to them for the feedback about the grade? can we speak to them about the feedback? Those make me get excited with the Speak activity. And ... i just wanna integrate the whole thing with Speak...
Here's a prototype interface for it :)
Anyway, why do i do XO? several things come to my mind.
- it's less than USD$200
- its battery long-lasting
- it can be used under sunshine/sun-light
- it can connect to a Wifi access point 1KM away
- it can run Flash
- it gives kids High DPI screen (their eyes will be fine in using it)
- it gives kids Email
- it gives kids Game (not yet an AngryBird out there)
- it gives kids Wiki
- it gives kids Internet
- it gives kids Calculator
- it gives kids IM, WebCam, VOIP
- it gives kids Music, jamming
- it gives kids E-book
- it gives kids Scratch for learning programming (or just story-boarding)
- it gives kids Painting, Drawing
- it gives kids a Maze ... (many kids love playing it ... both boys and girls :)
- it gives kids ...
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- it runs F/OSS
- And, it's less than USD$200
