[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] TuxEng Design Methodology

[Melissa Newman]

As a person who is a software engineer, and has studied Education (from a homeschooling parent perspective), you are biting way more off than you can chew.  Your program is unrealistic.

 

Level 1: Learning the letters and being able to say a word that begins with that letter.  Kids do this between 2 ½ to 4 ½.  (this level can be a game in itself, and there are plenty)

 

Level 2: Reading CVC words (constant vowel constant sounds).  This can take kids between 4 ½ to 6 ½ to master this.  Realistically it can take kids a good year to get through this level.  It is a very hard concept for kids to grasp.

 

Level 3.  Two beginning constants sounds.  Move through quickly.

 

Level 4: Ending two constant sounds.  Move through quickly.

 

Level 5: Two vowel sounds.  Kids move through slowly through this phase.

 

The above 5 levels are regular Hooked on Phonics, which has 5 levels.

 

All of those 5 different levels are just 1 syllable words, and you can honestly expect kids to take 2 years to get through it.

 

After that you are dealing with suffixes, prefixes, and multi syllable words.  That is probably another 1 – 3 years.

 

But that does not even talk about sentences.  

 

1.       Verb only:  Go!

2.       Noun and verb:  Alice sat.

3.       Adjectives:  The little Alice sat.

 

Look at the book “Simply Grammar” by Charlotte Mason.  And within that book, there are 4 different parts.

 

Now you are talking about paragraphs.  

 

Do you get idea?  

1.       Program 1: Learn the letters

2.       Program 2: Equivalent to hooked on phonics 

3.       Program 3: Equivalent to hooked on phonics Master reader

4.       Program 4: Equivalent to “Simply Grammar”

 

And that does not include paragraphs and essays.  Way too much in one product.  As the saying goes, “Jack of all trade, master of none.”

 

As a programmer and homeschooling parent, I would recommend creating a “TuxType To the Next Level” type of program.  Focus on copywork.  A lot of homeschooling parents believe that a student can learn to write well by copying text from great writers.  Start off with idioms and phrases (sentences).  Then move to short stories like Aesop’s Fables.  Then move onto longer stories.  There are already people who have done the grunt work.

 

1.       Charlotte Mason, the person who invented the idea of copywork.  Her recommended curriculum (actual source books) http://amblesideonline.org/curriculum.shtml

2.       E.D. Hersch – What your X Grader Needs to Know  http://coreknowledge.org

 

There are others, but in those two, most of the selections are in the public domain.  http://archive.org and http://www.gutenberg.org/ have a lot of public domain items in txt files.

 

There is also http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

 

If you do it as a “plugin” through Mahara, you can save yourself a lot of effort, and you will prepare students to move from your application to Mahara.

 

Melissa Newman

 

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