Show HN: 02Books – An open source web app to teach kids to read

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25501294

63 17 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I wanted to share a project that I've been working on designed to help young kids go from reading single words to reading whole books.

My husband and I started spending a lot of time teaching our 5-year-old (Alex) to read because our school district is exclusively doing remote learning and I was skeptical that he could learn to read over Zoom.

We used flashcards (which Alex found boring) and then combined them into sentences (which Alex found interesting). But the sentence approach requires a lot of arranging pieces of paper and remembering which words you are working on.

So I developed 02books for my family and decided to share.

You can use it (no account required!) here: https://02books.app/

Github: https://github.com/sofignatova/02books

Thanks for letting me share - this my first real open source project!

Regards, Sofya

442Rct• 6 years ago

Will share this with a teacher friend in Finland. Thanks

Hulless_Barley4• 6 years ago

You are welcome! I would love for other people to use this.

mncharity4• 6 years ago

Any brainstorming thoughts on the following? Years back I though of taking something like the OP app, and using it as input to an... ambient interactive implicit curriculum of science and engineering.

So imagine you type "cat". Then maybe you get a picture of a cat. Maybe from ancient Egypt. Or maybe tiles of labeled behavior videos, sleep, walk, eat, etc. Or a yowl. Maybe with a scrubbable intensity plot. Or maybe that intensity is shown as a fast spreading sound ripple, overlaid on a top view of your own neighborhood. Maybe with a draggable microphone, to play with volume, and delay, and doppler. Or back to cat, maybe you get video with a 200 bpm cat's fast heart rate. And maybe an order of magnitude animal mass slider. Slide up to human, to whale, and get the word "whale", video of swimming whale, and a whale's 20 bpm heart swishing. And similarly down to mouse 600 bpm. Or back to cat, ... it's a high-dimensional densely-woven tapestry of possibilities.

When the most popular introductory astronomy textbooks can't even manage to get the color of the Sun right, there seems a need to explore new ways to deliver an understanding of the physical world. Pity child automatic speech recognition is still so poor.

Back down towards MVP, might "type a word, get a picture" be interesting? Not so much? Way too distracting? Other thoughts? Thanks for input.

Hulless_Barley4• 6 years ago

The MVP might be interesting because you could teach kids sightwords by associating an image with a word without having to curated all of the pictures manually.

mncharity4• 6 years ago

Nice idea. I've seen teachers teaching scale, struggling to gather images of objects, paired with their size information, making curated image sets helpful. I wonder if a commons-licensed common-word-and-associated-image set already exists? Wikipedia header images might approximate it.

soferio• 6 years ago

MVP Like this? I made it for my son: https://apps.apple.com/au/app/word-magic-toddler-reading-and...

guai888• 6 years ago

I think this application is great! 30 years ago, I emigrated to US when I was 13 years old. I knew only 26 letters and maybe one hundred words. I had to bring up my language skill up to high school level within few years so I can graduate high school and kept my grade good enough in order to enter college. Retain vocabulary through reading is what works for me. It is difficult to remember words without context. Back then, I started with toddler's book then progressed to young adult science fictions. I enjoyed the fastest progress with young adult fictions. I think what you created is very helpful for kid. I will try it out with my son. I am back to Asia now and try to teach my son English.

mncharity4• 6 years ago

Nifty! Has it been working out for users?

Any thoughts on whether extending it to animated images might not/work? Might help with verbs?

Bigger picture, perhaps imagine a UI with two panes. One the regular app. And the other, a... bantering play space, where the app can do sciencey interactive jazz improv on what's been said in the regular app. Any feel for whether this would work, or be too distracting? Has anyone seen something like this?

h4tch• 6 years ago

That sounds interesting. A virtual learning environment filled with content that can be dynamically manipulated and discovered through an intuitive sandbox/playground interface.

mncharity4• 6 years ago

Yes!

One of the greatest failures of current science education is weaving knowledge integration. We're doing a bit better than Feynman's description of then Brasil, with grad students having memorized an encyclopedia of science factoids, but utterly unable to reason with them. But even now, ask first-tier astronomy grad students "a 5-year old asks, What color is the Sun ball?" and "What color is sunlight?", and it's usual to get a wrong answer to the first, and not uncommon to get a correct answer to the second, sometimes followed a "<pause> that doesn't make sense, does it?", as two incompatible factoids seemingly collide for the first time since Kindergarten. And first-tier physical-sciences grad students' grasp of color can get really wonky. And then there's everyone else. So we're maybe doing better than Feynman's Brasil, but the available room for improvement is not small.

Anyway, interdisciplinary richly-interconnected sandbox/playground play seems it might help?

And I've seen little like that. Years ago, there was a computer game (name escapes me), loaded with a big database of objects. So users, IIRC, could request almost arbitrary "I want to wield a <thing>, while riding a <thing>". IIRC, riding dinosaurs was popular. So imagine using that to informally teach about the world. "I'm sorry, your giant ant collapsed upon creation, unable to support it's L^3-scaled body on L^2-scaled leg thickness. Give it elephant legs instead?"

A virtual learning environment

And it needn't be entirely virtual. Witness projective sandboxes.[1] I recently saw a talk by Cynthia Breazeal, where a furry robot, mounted on a desk next to a tablet with integrated apps, provides peer mentoring and emotional support. So even if developing visual systems constrain the use of AR glasses to "a shallow-3D virtual screen", we might still leverage mixed reality.

[1] https://arsandbox.ucdavis.edu/

mindhash• 6 years ago

Like how you used dynamic url for user separation.

Hulless_Barley4• 6 years ago

Thanks! I used this approach because I didn't want to implement all of the logic related to account management i.e. account creation, login and password recovery.

This way is a lot easier so I'm surprised that more websites don't use this approach.

heyjrokulsihsk• 6 years ago

this cause people to view other people's information with just "randomisation".

sudhirxps• 6 years ago

is there a name for this approach?

k_sze• 6 years ago

I love the idea.

Can you write up a contributing guide so we can contribute word packs? It would also be useful to categorise such word packs by language (there's no reason this can't be used for Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, etc.).

EDIT: languages like Chinese and Japanese might be tricky because we don't use spaces to denote word boundaries. The word boundaries are implicit. So the word selection/highlighting might be a bit funky.

Hulless_Barley4• 6 years ago

I'll do a write up tomorrow.

For now, you can see some examples here: https://github.com/sofignatova/02books/tree/master/server/co...

There is a script to help build these here: https://github.com/sofignatova/02books/blob/master/corpora_c...

smurf_t• 6 years ago

Nice work! What is the logic behind choosing the corpora https://github.com/sofignatova/02books/tree/master/corpora_c..., I could find some links in the comments but what was your strategy in picking words/sentences.

Show HN: 02Books – An open source web app to teach kids to read

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