![]() ![]() The computer in Lucian's room is an old slot-load 400MHz PowerPC G3 Tangerine iMac with 512MB of RAM and a 10GB HD running Tiger 10.4x. Learning with AlphaBaby from TheMacMommy on Vimeo. Someday I'll get a better camera when we can afford it.) The video is from our little point&shoot Nikon. I don't know where the knocking sound comes from. (Sorry about the video quality, but I snuck up on them playing and it was night time. Here is a bad, sorry video I made of Poltergeist Alpha Baby in action starring Lucian teaching his Daddy about colors, shapes and people. We just got a new baby cousin a week ago and now another cousin is on the way so as soon as I get those baby pictures, I'll add them to his library and Alpha Baby will add them in at random. I prefer us interacting with him while using this application in a flashcard type of way.Īlpha Baby will no doubt come in handy for the future as we get new pictures of people that I can add to his iPhoto library. This works ok, but for harder names, you can imagine the speech to text is not perfect. It would take some time and effort, but you can, if you want, go into iPhoto and change the title of each picture to the name of the person and then in Alpha Baby, tell it to speak the name of the photo. Now, with practice, Lucian can instantly recognize a picture of Joanna as "An YoYo." We're still working on saying Great Grandmom. Before we came home, he couldn't say the name of his new Aunt Joanna, who likes to be called Aunt JoJo. I even used a mixture of recent as well as older photos of some of the children as well as side views of people to see if he recognizes facial changes and he does! It's amazing how well he recognizes peoples' pictures and can say their names more and more clearly every time he interacts with this application. I used photos of people he knows locally as well as far away since we have family and friends all over the world now. In Lucian's user account in his iPhoto album, I loaded 170 photos of friends and family members. I didn't, but you can even map certain keys to specific photos. Alpha Baby is a wonderful tool for this because you can set the preferences to allow photos to pop up whenever certain keys are pressed. Now that we're back home, I want him to be able to retain the connections he's made over the summer. A year later and he can now comprehend who people are and he is beginning to learn which family members are related to him and how. The last time we flew out to PA, he was only starting to speak a few words and associate faces of people. I could launch Alpha Baby and entertain him for just a while longer until we were ready to make the next stop.ĭuring this long, 2-month trip, Lucian got to see and meet many different friends and family members. All I had to do was click onto Lucian's user icon in the menubar and as soon as the cube began to rotate, his face would light up. Having the laptop along for the ride came in handy many times. During the trip, Nate drove and I sat in the back seat next to Lucian and entertained him. This past summer, we went on a cross-country road trip and we drove from AZ to PA and a couple of other states along the east coast. Between using this application and a few other online resources, he has learned the entire alphabet before the age of two. As he got older, I changed the preferences to show letters, colors and lines. ![]() You can customize the application for different age groups so when Lucian was an infant, he loved just looking intently at the colors and shapes on the screen. I can not tell you how many times this app has come in handy. (I plan on revising that tutorial for OS X 10.5 Leopard once I finally decide on which screencasting application I want to use.) You may remember in a previous post how I detailed setting up a separate user account for your child on your Mac. Daddy's G4 has the Alpha Baby icon readily accessible in the Dock. The laptop and the iMac each have a separate user account created just for Lucian with almost identical preferences set. We have a G4 in the office, an iMac in Lucian's room and the MacBook Pro - everywhere. This application is loaded on all three of the computers in our home. It really came in handy before, during and after our recent cross-country road trip. It's called Alpha Baby and it's a FREE download. I want to tell you about one of my most favorite Mac applications for kids. ![]()
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