Topologika's Talking Nursery Rhymes were designed by Brian and Maddy Kerslake while stuck in traffic on the way back from the 1993 Norwich Computer Services show. Copyright in the program concept is theirs.
Animations by Glenn Burnett, Ion Larruzea and Irune Izagirre using Artworks from Computer Concepts and a custom animation routine written by Glenn who also created the box artwork.
The original Version 1 code and graphic design was by Ben Warner, completed by Jason O'Broin, who completely rewrote the code for Version 2. The Version 2 code is Copyright (C) Jason OæBroin 1993/94/96.
Rhymes spoken by Tamsin Blight.
Technical
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The rhymes will only run on RISC OS 3 machines with at least 2mb of memory. They run in mode 15 which means that on Éneweræ machines running RISC OS 3.5 or 3.6 they will appear in Életterboxæ style, ie elongated horizontally. You may wish to use your monitors vertical/horizontal size controls (if it has them) to counteract this. We regret there was no way the rhymes could be written in any other mode and still make them work on 2mb machines.
Because of the wide variety of printers and drivers now in use we cannot guarantee that your hardware combination will lead to successful printing from the rhymes on 2mb machines. A later section of this manual explains how to print, and suggests a work round if you canæt.
Introduction
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Talking Rhymes is a series of packages aimed at pre- and early readers. Each program is based on a well known Nursery Rhyme. Although the rhyme is different in each program, each activity works in identical ways, so this guide covers all of them. Each Talking Rhyme can be presented in the form of a picture or words or both. The picture and/or words are jumbled up and the child must un-jumble them. To help with this they can view the completed picture and/or hear the words spoken. Once the picture or rhyme is complete, the program takes over and presents the rhyme as a delightful animation with music.
We wanted to store the sampled speech once as 'bites' and then again as the complete rhyme but, even with compression, this took up too much space. In order to provide you with each rhyme on the minimum number of discs we cut each rhyme in to individual words which are reassembled as the program runs.
We also wanted to enable users, if they wished, to substitute our with their own children's voices. Unfortunately this has not proved possible, since the program needs to know the exact lengths of each sample in both centiseconds and bytes in order to replay the rhyme smoothly and fairly rhythmically.
Because the number of words which have to be displayed on each line of a rhyme is variable we have occasionally had to use a variety of font sizes in a particular line. Whilst this is not ideal, it has not proved a problem with our guinea pigs.
Getting started
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The RISC OS Talking Rhymes can print out the screen as they go along. Once the program has loaded it will check to see if you have a printer driver loaded (see page 15). If not, you will be given the option to quit the program and load one. If you do not wish to load a driver you will be taken to the Main Screen.
NB Printing takes up a lot of memory and it may be that on 2mb machines with some versions of Acornæs printer drivers you may not be able to run the program with a printer driver loaded. Ways of coping with this are detailed in the special section on printing later in this manual.
Quitting: press Escape, the Quit the application from the icon bar in the usual way.
The Main Screen
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The largest part of the screen is taken up with the puzzle itself. This consists of a picture and/or text jumbled up. The way puzzles are jumbled is controlled from the Preferences Menu (see page 9).
To un-jumble the rhyme simply 'drag' any part of the picture (and/or words) to anywhere else by pointing at the part to be moved, holding down the left button then, while keeping it held down, dragging the piece to its new position, where the left button should be released. Whatever piece was formerly in the place to which the piece has just been dragged will now be in the place it came from; in other words 'dragging and dropping' has the effect of swapping two pieces over.
There are a couple of important extras. The first is that if you have selected text, with or without the picture, the text in the piece being dragged will be spoken while the left button is held down. The second is that there is a 'black hole' on the screen the size of one piece of the puzzle. This can be used to store any one piece at any time just by dragging it into and out of it or swapping to and from it.
There are a number of icons on the screen to help with re-assembling the rhyme and managing the program. Whether or not all these actually appear depends on the settings in the Preferences Menu.
The Eye
The Ear
Grid
Picture and Text
Printer
Moves
The number of moves made is recorded at the top of the screen. If a move is not made after a short while a move is added anyway. (We found during testing that this kept children's attention on the task in hand.) To indicate that this has happened the eye winks as the move is added.
The Animation Screen
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Once the puzzle is correctly completed, you can choose to either play again, or play the animation. If you choose the animation, the graphic area scrolls open to full size, the rhyme may be spoken one more time (this can be switched of in the Acorn version but its always spoken in the PC version) then an animated sequence appears which tells the story of the rhyme with accompanying sing-along music.
During the animation there are several controls available. Quit and Print work as described earlier.
Stop
Play
Puzzle
The Preferences Menu
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Preference settings cannot be saved. You will have to set the program up as you want each time you load it.
Pressing <Escape> at any point in the program will take you back to the Desktop. Now click SELECT on the Rhymes icon, and move the pointer over the small arrow to the right of the word ÉChoicesæ. The Preferences are now available.
Puzzle Type
The puzzle types available to the children can be in the following three combinations. The default is 'picture only'.
Grid Type
This offers three different types of grid for children to work on. The type set from this menu is the only type they will be able to use.
'Lines' 'Squares' 'Columns'
The default is 'Lines', which means that the rhyme will be split up into 'sentences'. When you click on a piece you will hear a line (but only if text is displayed).
'Squares' means that the rhyme will be split, as far as possible, into individual words. When you click on a word you will hear a word (but only if Text is displayed).
'Columns' means that the words are spoken in columns. When you click on a column you will hear the words in that column (but only if Text is displayed). This option has little meaning in the real world, of course, but it can be lots of fun.
Printer
If a printer driver was not loaded before you loaded Talking Rhymes, the printer box will remain blank even if you click on it. To load a printer driver you must quit the program.
Volume
The volume icon is a short slider bar. Use SELECT to drag the slider back and forwards.
Help
The RISC OS help is displayed by clicking with the middle button on the rhyme icon on the menu bar, then moving the mouse up to HELP. You can bring up the desktop so you can see the icon by holding down one of the <Shift> keys and pressing F12, or just press <Escape>. To start the rhyme again, click the left button on the rhyme icon.
Auto Start
This option is available only from the icon bar menu (click on the rhyme icon with the middle button). When Auto Start is on, double clicking a different rhyme will run it immediately. If Auto Start is off, double clicking a different rhyme will load it, but it will not run until the rhyme icon is clicked on.
OK
This takes you back to the Main Screen.
Quit
The Quit icon takes you back to the Desktop. To run the RISC OS rhyme again, click on the icon with the left button.
Working with Talking Rhymes
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Here are some ideas for ways in which you might be able to use Talking Rhymes in the classroom or at home. This list of suggestions is by no means exhaustive and we would be delighted to receive more ideas from you.
Some of the suggestions are aimed at the very young and others at older children with special needs who we know think Talking Rhymes are great.
Language Development
Glenn Burnett's splendid animations really do get children talking. Ask them to watch the animation several times (if they miss something they can always play it backwards) and then to relate what happened. Make this into a story telling session. Record their suggestions, then play them back whilst watching the animation to see whose story comes closest to the real thing.
Ask the children to listen carefully to the samples in the game. Discuss where they have heard similar sounding voices. Enquire about books they know or characters they have heard talking in similar 'cartooney' ways.
Ask them to listen again while you click on the Ear icon to play the rhyme in scrambled form. Can they tell you about any books they have read or videos they have seen in which speech is jumbled up? (Mr Topsy Turvy by Roger Hargreaves comes to mind, as do the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear.)
Perhaps they can make up their own nonsense rhymes or jumbled sentences. (Breakthrough to Literacy materials will be useful here.)
Have a chant-along session with the computer by continually clicking on the Eye icon so that the rhyme repeats. Ask the children to decide if the computer speaks rhythmically .
Recreate the characters as puppets and ask the children to act out the rhymes as plays.
Music
Have a singalong session with the animations.
Ask the children to listen carefully to the samples in the game. Then record one or more children reciting the rhyme. Study the playbacks for rhythm and expression.
If your tape recorder has fast and slow speeds, record someone speaking the rhyme at a normal speed, then play it back fast. Discuss how this raises the pitch of the voice.
Use our music program for the early years Music Box to challenge children to invent their own sound tracks for the animations (yes they can) or simply to recreate the tunes. Give them the tunes with mistakes in and see if they can spot them and put them right. Give them the tunes and ask them to create a harmony.
Art and Design
Provide the children with copies of the artwork provided with the pack. Ask them to colour them in.
Make photocopies of the artwork provided and stick on card. Cut them up and use as picture jigsaws.
Display the rhyme as text only and print it out. Make photocopies and stick on card. Cut them up and use as word jigsaws. (Remember there are three varieties: words, lines, or 'columns' (see page 9).
RISC OS users could print out the screen during an animation sequence. You can print the screen at any time, so you can create an endless number of images. Use these to create a set of pictures for children to sequence. Use these to generate story ideas.
RISC OS users can purchase a copy of our Nursery Rhyme Clip Art Pack, which is based on the characters to be found in Talking Rhymes. Each image is supplied as a compressed file which will load into our best-selling starter art pack TinyDraw, in which children can have a great time simply colouring them in. The images are also supplied as Draw files which can be loaded into !Draw or any other RISC OS vector-based art pack, as well as into the latest version of our DeskTop Imagine art-and-maths pack.
Mathematics
The program provides three puzzle type: words, lines and columns. Paper picture puzzles need not, of course, be restricted in this way; you could, for example, create puzzles made from any shapes that tessellate.
Ask the children to count how many pieces there are in a puzzle which has four rows of six pieces. Can they record this as an addition (6 + 6 + 6 + 6 = 24) and as a multiplication (4 x 6 = 24)? How would they record the column puzzle?
Use our Number Tiles program to allow children to investigate similar number sentences in a more structured way.
Ask them to find Nursery Rhymes with more than four lines. Challenge them to decide how these could have been split up for an extended version of Talking Rhymes. How many 'cells' would have been needed? What 'sums' and 'tables' calculations do these suggest? Would this really be possible given the limitations of the screen?
Printing
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Whenever you know that you will want to use a printer during a session with a Talking Rhyme, you must load a printer driver. Do this before you load the program. To load a printer driver, point at the printer driver icon, and double click. After a few seconds the printer driver icon will install itself on the desktop icon bar.
Make sure that the printer driver is the correct one for your hardware. If you don't know which printer driver you have, install it on the icon bar then click the middle button. Point at 'Info' and slide the pointer to the right. A window will open giving the version number and date.
Acorn have released various versions of !Printers: the higher the version number the more printers are supported and. in theory at least, the better they are and the faster they work. The penalty for these Égainsæ is that they consume more memory.
The original version of Talking Rhymes had to be Éshoehornedæ into 2mb machines, and we are well aware that many users had problems printing on such machines - there wasnæt enough memory to run the rhymes and to run a printer driver.
We had hoped to cure this in version 2 but, unfortunately, during the rewrite, Acornæs drivers and the standards of printers have moved on. Each rhymes uses different amounts of memory, the various drivers do the same, so it is difficult for us to be certain that each Talking Rhyme will work and print on your 2mb machine with your driver and printer.
The following sections offer advice on getting a rhyme to print, together with a work round if you canæt.
Printing from a Talking Rhyme on 2mb machines:
1 Quit all other applications and reset the computer
2 Load the driver
3 Set the resolution you want (180x180 or medium resolution)
4 Quit the driver. This frees up a lot of the memory used by the driver
5 Load the Rhyme that you want, and try a print out. If it fails, there isnæt enough memory to run the rhyme and the printer driver. Either use a machine with more memory, or use the separate Print Utility, !TRPrint.
Print Utility
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!TRPrint is a special program supplied on a separate disc which allows children simply to set up a jigsaw and print it out. Puzzles cannot be completed and animations cannot be seen. This is a much smaller program than the standard Talking Rhymes, so should allow printing on a 2mb machine when the normal program won't.
Before running !TRPrint, make sure the full version of the rhyme program is quit.
To use !TRPrint, load a printer driver, and double click on the !TRPrint icon before you double click on a rhyme.
If you wish to use a Rhyme with sound and animation, !TRPrint must be quit before loading the new Rhyme.
