Hello Animal is an educational computer program targeted at primary/elementary school students to improve their English proficiency and vocabulary. The program is built with C# and WPF and uses Kinect as a speech recognizer and also as the main interaction media for children.
This project was done as part of Human & Computer Interaction course, as the students for this course are required to develop from an existing appication or develop a whole new application from scratch, using unconventional/niche platforms such as Virtual Reality or Kinect (via PC) to emphasize on the interaction between the human (user) and the computer.
This application is targeted towards primary/elementary school students to improve their English fluency and vocabulary. We see that conventional learning methods are getting a bit outdated and we see an opportunity for 'why not breaking the market using our app as the media?'
This app uses Kinect as the main input for the speech recognizer, and users will interact with the app by using their voice. All app interactions are speech-based, and because of that the Kinect is an integral part of the app. This application has 9 difficulty stages (levels), with the first three levels show the animals' names, the second three obscures some of the animals' names, and the last three completely obscures the animals' names. The users will then have to say the animals' names as shown on the screen (or by guessing it, depending on the difficulty). After a few animal screens, the game ends, and shows how well you do in the game by showing you the score. Hooray!
- Windows system with at least .NET Framework 4.5 installed
- Xbox 360 Kinect
We're still working for application deployment, but you can always build yourself by building the application from the solution. Stay tuned for updates!
0.1 (29 March 2017)
- Rebased the whole application from scratch
- Implemented the design prototypes
- STATUS: not working, no functions written yet.
0.1.1 (31 March 2017)
- Functions written
- Implemented more design
- STATUS: not working, missing some assets
0.2 (3 April 2017)
- Implemented more concepts based on feedbacks received on the prototype
- Speech grammar dictionary built
- STATUS: not working, speech grammar not included in properties yet
0.3 (10 April 2017)
- Functions finalized
- Kinect DLL dependencies added
- First-time testing the app
- STATUS: 10% working
0.4 (19 April 2017)
- Kinect DLL dependencies broken
- Added more designs, bloating the solution a bit more
- Added some missing functionalities that was supposed to be included in the last build
- STATUS: 45% working
0.5 (25 April 2017)
- Now with scores!
- Cleaned up the Kinect DLL dependencies.
- Apparently the scores didn't reset. Will fix
- STATUS: 85% working
0.5.1 (1 May 2017)
- Project uploaded to GitHub!
- And some more undocumented changes I forgot to write down. Whoops
0.5.2 (3 May 2017)
- Code Housekeeping
- Bugs squashed
- Reworked the whole scoring system
- Apparently the Kinect DLL dependencies is still problematic as well. Next update!
0.6 (17 May 2017)
- Fixed the Kinect connectivity problem
- Project phased from prototype phase to pre-Alpha
- Pause seems to be acting funky, will fix in next update
- STATUS: 95% working
0.7 (22 May 2017)
- Cleaned up some more code
- Updated more designs
- Pause fixed
- More bugs squashed
- Ready for public testing
- Optimize the app
- Clean some unused assets