Seeking advice on writing a program or..

[vanman]

Greetings ppl,
Sorry if it is in the wrong forum but i was in a hurry.. I am urgently seeking advice as to what program my wife can use or one in opensource,freeware i can alter to help children with hearing and speech problems. She works at a clinic where these kids come for treatment with the speech and hearing therapist. She is currently busy improving all the aids they use at the therapist with regards to drawings, pictures and animated characters. Only problem though it is on paper and the kids tend to loose interest soon so.... Her problem at this stage is that she wants to put it onto pc and still make it easy enough for kids from age 2-7years to use a mouse and maybe a little bit of animation regarding the character..Also for parents to use with their children at home..For instance she wants to use a little wizard of some kind in the form of a bee, face of a wise old lady or man, which they can then click on when they get stuck to get a hint of some kind and also to verify the answer they provide.

I am going to try and give you a simple example. She wants to maybe take a simple room with a chair bed, bookcase, desk, waiter’s bell; etc…Whatever you put into the room depends on what the assignment is..Now when they point to the bookcase for instance, there should be something like..What do you want to do 1.look at books2.pick up a book 3 or ask the wizard??How?? He will then point to the bell or act by activating speech commands to go to the bell and ring it for an answer to whatever the question was. Now she would like them to be able to use objects and speech with characters in it to make the assignments interesting and to keep their attention at all times during the exercise..

If you can remember a long way back there were games like Hugo’s house of horrors (not to use. just an example of the way the game was designed), goblins etc. The way they were designed is more or less what she wants to do. I know there is software out there, which can be specially written for that purpose, but as we all know will cost a fortune!! Swish and morphing programs come to mind but I think is difficult for her to fully utilize. I have a digital camera so she can add her own images and so on..

Please help me here guys!! I know this is the only site where I can depend on sound advice and I will appreciate any feedback given..

Edited already..She just asked me if it is possible to put it in storybook form..thx

Regards
vanman

[.:front2back:.]

Well i would personally recommend Dark Basic .

But others will most likely post better ideas then what i could..


cheers
front2back

[vanman]

Thx f2bck for coming back to me and the program looks exellant..I will try it for sure!!

[csl]

visual basic and microsoft's speech recognition engine might suit you well. finding a project in the open domain that you like and are able to edit to your needs will probably take a lot more effort than creating your own. animations can be done in flash and integrated into the app to have a smooth look to it. or if someone else (perhaps v_ln) can point you towards a voice recognition engine for flash, then go with all flash. it seems like a rather fun project to play with, please do show updates if you decide to create this yourself.