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Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

Topicmarks

31 Dec

I came across a web tool today called Topicmarks.  

Topicmarks summarises text documents electronically and provides you with a short synopsis of the text a few minutes later.

There is a great example here to demonstrate the power of this tool.  From the original text the following is provided for you:

  • a list of facts
  • a condensed symmary or synopsis
  • the keywords from the text
  • an alphabetised index of words or terms with links to the original source

 I can see this being an excellent tool to use for anyone who needs to write an academic essay or paper prefaced with a synopsis of their work.

At the moment this tool is in beta and is free for everyone to use.  Further down the line it looks likely that there will be a charge for heavy users.  However the developers state that it will remain free to use for light users such as students.

 
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Posted in Software, Web 2.0 tools

 

Kodu – a free game making system

08 Dec

Microsoft have made efforts to introduce an educational game-making  system into their popular 360 Xbox machine. It is called Kodu. This is their intro paragraph…

Kodu provides an end-to-end creative environment for designing,
building, and playing your own new games. The core of the Kodu
project is the programming user interface. The language is simple
and entirely icon-based. Programs are composed of pages, which are broken down into rules, which are further divided into conditions and actions.
Conditions are evaluated simultaneously..

Initially I thought it was a purely Xbox effort according to this link.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/

It has to be more general than that surely?

Kodu game maker

But on that page there is a link on the right hand side that points to a ‘free PC version’

http://fuse.microsoft.com/project/kodu.aspx

This explains in general terms what is is all about. I wanted to see some real-world examples and at the bottom of that page can be found a link

www.planetkodu.com

This takes you to the personal game-making efforts.

On that page I clicked on the first example of a real game called ‘Kudo Turismo’. It was only a 39kb download, so obviously there must be something else needed to support that code. And indeed there was. On the left hand side is a link called Fuse-Labs download which is a 184Mb msi download. The version I downloaded was 1.0.48.0.

I clicked on the msi file and it said I did not have the XNA Framework installed. It offered a link to download and so I clicked on that. The XNA install started and then it wanted to install Directx 9.0c components as well.

Do you ever get the idea that some software is a virtual Matryoshka doll? Each one requiring their own additional bits of software?

After all that, the KoduSetup.msi did install and played the .kodu game I had downloaded. It did hint heavily about the Xbox controls that would drive the game, although the good old keyboard arrow keys also did the job. The graphics and sounds are very good though.

So all in all – it did the job. But the caveat is that you must have the right environment installed on the PC network to support it… Directx 9 -> XNA ->Kodu setup.

If you want to enthuse your students in computing via game-making then perhaps the effort of setting up the right environment might be worth it.

 
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Posted in Entertainment, Software

 

Access database helps Motor Neurone Disease sufferers speak.

11 Nov

You may think that the Access database that comes with the top end Office suite is only useful for mundane things such as stock control but you would be wrong.

Patricia Ruckoff was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease (MND) in 2009 and her daughter Melissa of course wanted to help. MND gradually destroys upper and lower torso muscle control which includes being able to speak. Stephen Hawking is perhaps the most well known sufferer of MND and his robotic speech is almost part of his persona. But many people want to be able to communicate with more emotion and personality if possible, perhaps even speak with an accent to reflect who they are.

After trawling the internet, she found a small company called Time is Ltd. Ian Schofield is a director of the company and he is the inventor of a system called JayBee. The name is quite personal as Jay was a friend and Bridget was his mother-in-law and both succumbed to MND. He – also – wanted to help his friends communicate but the present systems were extremely expensive and had very limited predictive speech power. It took ages to type out ‘pillow’ or ‘water’ when  perhaps only one muscle could be controlled.  There had to be a better way, and so he set about developing a new system.

To keep costs down, he needed to use off-the-shelf software as much as possible and this is where Access proved to be so helpful. When running on a modern computer, Access is an extremely fast and powerful data processing application. This would be the backbone of the predictive speech and artificial intelligence programme that is JayBee. Mind you, it was not a trivial task – over 2,500 hours of effort was invested in developing the Visual Basic (VBA) code. Once the processing engine was in place, they worked with another company called CereProc who can create voices that sound like the original person if they have enough material to work with.

In the video below, Ian Schofield explains JayBee to Vitali Vitaliev of IET.tv.

This is an Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) clip. I am a long-time chartered engineer with the IET and encourage any of your students aspiring to be professional engineers to look into what it can offer in terms of professional development.

This clip would be an excellent introduction into how ICT helps overcome disability.

 
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Posted in Communication, Databases, Disability, Impact of ICT, New technology, Social effects of ICT, Software

 

Lack of iPhone programmers

26 Oct

With the explosion of ‘apps’ for the iPhone, Cirencester College has recognised that there is a huge demand for iPhone programmers in this country.

iphone

To that end they are putting together BTEC, IT and A level modules to show students how to build apps and games.

This is an example of how education organisations need to keep a constant eye on the IT industry to ensure that young people learn the most relevant skills at the time.

Full story here

 
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Posted in Education, Mobile phones, New technology, Software

 

UK government backs open source

01 Mar

opensource1

Many of us have tried and swear by some of the open source packages that are available.  I for one wouldn’t dream of using any browser at home other than Firefox and when it came to selecting a VLE to use at my school, my vote went to Moodle.   I’m even dabbling with Linux and Open Office on some of our departmental laptops.

Why then, if there is so much high quality open source software available and money in the public arena is so restricted, have the government insisted until now, that we use commercial software?  I was really pleased to see the news report this week which states that the UK government will start to ‘accelerate the use of open source software in public services.’

Read the full news story here

Suggestions for use in class and questions for students (subscription only)

 
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Posted in Software