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Lezen

A free educational program for children

What does the program do? Picture of screen System Requirements Purpose of the Lezen program

Other program features Download stuff Creating your own word list Technical information

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What does the program do?

1.	The child clicks on any rectangle containing a " ? ". The yellow face is the mouse cursor.
2.	This causes a word to appear (in  red ). The word is selected at random from a list. An adult can create a suitable list for the child.
3.	After the child reads the word out loud, the child clicks on the box containing the word. The box then turns  green  and the computer then "plays" the sound file named mama.wav. If the child read the word correctly, the child chooses a new hidden word (go to step 1).
4.	If the child made a mistake reading a word, the child clicks on the box once more. The box now turns  red  again (with an accompanying sound and the error counter on the status line is incremented). The child now chooses a new hidden word (go to step 1), and retries the hard word at the end of the session.

Picture of screen

System requirements

• Windows 95 or Windows NT (Windows 3.x is not enough).
• A mouse or other pointing device for clicking on the BIG rectangles. This is pretty easy - even for small children.
• A sound card (to play WAV files - an essential part of the program).
• Optional: a microphone (if you want to extend the repertoire - recommended, but you don't need the microphone too often, so be creative...).

Purpose of the Lezen program

1. As a program to teach my 6-year old daughter to read. In Dutch, "Lezen" means "to read".
   The program is reasonably flexible however, so it can probably be used for teaching other things as well:
   • pronunciation of foreign words (written "deux" becomes spoken "deux")
   • translation plus pronunciation (e.g. written "two" becomes spoken "deux")
   • elementary arithmetic (e.g. "4x3" to spoken "twelve")
   • quizzes (e.g. "California" to spoken "Sacramento")
2. As a vehicle to teach myself to program for Windows 95. The program thus contains a few features which are there primarily because they were easy, fun or useful to program.

Other program features

• You can load a new list of words using the File|Open command. This provides a full "Explorer-style" dialog box which supports long file names. A default list is incorporated inside the program itself.
• The list of all words is displayed in alphabetical order in a scrollable "list box" in the upper right hand corner.
• Double clicking on any entry in the list box causes the word's sound to be played.
• Typing any letter while the list box is "active" (click), causes the list box to jump to a word starting with that letter. Try pressing the same letter a second time too.
• The list of all words can be printed using the File|Print command. Files whose sound files (e.g. *.wav) are missing are printed with a warning message.
• Applause (Clap4.wav) is heard after all words have been completed.
• The program plays "tada" (Tada.wav) music when you start the program and politely says "goodbye" (Goodbye.wav) when you leave.
• The window is fully resizable.
• The gray sunken boxes at the top don't do anything. They contain so-called "static text".
• The mouse becomes a face only while it is positioned above one of the boxes.
• The status line displays context sensitive help while you browse through the various menus.
• If a sound file is missing, Windows will play a beep-like sound file instead.
• The colors of the background and boxes can be adjusted. This option is not very useful because the settings are not saved.
• The "Options|Modal dialogX" command does nothing.

Downloading the program

• Typical download speeds are 100 Kbytes/minute (14.4 kbaud modem) or 200 Kbytes/minute (28.8 kbaud modem). Heavy network traffic may, however, reduce these rates by a factor of 2 or more.
• Please check the exact size of any downloaded files against the expected file size. The test file 100bytes.pat can be downloaded for test purposes. If it is loaded correctly (as a binary file) it's size will be exactly 100 bytes. If it is loaded as an ASCII file, it will be about 114 bytes long instead (due to CR/LF conversion).

Creating your own word list

brillig
slythy
toves
gyre
gimble
the wabe


Notes:

• The sequence of the words is not important (the words are sorted alphabetically when the file is read).
• Empty lines and non-printable characters are ignored.
• Long words (or phrases) are truncated to 15 characters. If this is not enough, change the source code (#define MAXSTRING 15). You may find, however, that you need to use a smaller screen font.
• Long lists are no problem. I am currently using a list with about 100 words and the program has been tested with up to 10,000 words. 10,000-word lists take about 10 seconds to load (on a Pentium machine), but then work fine (assuming your disk and file system can handle 10,000 .WAV files of at least 10Kbytes each!).

Each word in the list should have a corresponding sound file (e.g. brillig.wav, toves.wav). These wav files can best be placed in the same directory as the Lezen program. You can create wav files using a microphone and the Windows 95 Sound Recorder program (SNDREC32.EXE - located in the \WIN directory). You can use any sound encoding/compression mode supported by your PC (see File|Properties setting in SNDREC32.EXE). I normally use a setting named "PCM 22,050 Hz, 4 Bit, Mono" because this results in a reasonable tradeoff between sound quality and file size.

Technical information

• The program is written in C using the IDE version of Borland's C++ 5.01 compiler.
• The source code consists of roughly 1500 lines of code.
• The program makes direct use of the Win32 API (much of the code is based on examples from the famous Programming Windows 95 book by Charles Petzold and Paul Yao).
• The default word list is stored as a 'resource'.
• The individual boxes are implemented as 'child windows'.
• The entire source code is available (e.g. for others learning to program for Windows, for those who feel that they want to modify the program, or for ex-UNIX users who feel that they must have the source code of any program which is worth using). Please let me know if you make any improvements (and be sure to keep an eye on this web page to check if there is a newer version of the source code available).

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Direct any remarks or questions to Peter van den Hamer (vdhamer@msn.com).