Welcome to Free Schooling
If you are looking for Freeplay, Chronogears or jsynth you have come to the right place. Read on to find out how they fit into Free Schooling.News
- 17 January 2002
- This project is going underground for an indefinite period. I'm joining another team on a related development. Once that program is sufficiently developed I'll bring it over to Free Schooling and continue here. See ya later!
Overview
Free Schooling's vision is to become a repository for the very best high school course material created by expert teachers. This material will be available for free from this site.The development model is inspired by the open source software movement, where thousands of independent programmers have collaborated to create quality software.
The lessons available on Free Schooling will not be dreary maths drills or even passive audio/visual presentations. Rather, each lesson will seem more like a game where learning is fun, challenging and an adventure.
The Free Schooling project is currently developing the tools that can be used by teachers to create the lessons. The main tool is Freeplay. This is a multimedia authoring program especially oriented to writing lessons. Freeplay builds on another open source project Chronogears, which is the low level graphics engine used by Freeplay.
Freeplay
This is the main lesson authoring tool which is currently under development. The inspiration for the program are the slightly old fashioned 2D adventure games. Freeplay is basically a graphical game development system with some modules required for course writers.Why 2D and not 3D in this day and age? Creating 3D games and the models they require is an order of magnitude more difficult than creating 2D games. 3D is OK for professional game designers but the learning curve for a teacher without this type of experience would probably be too steep.
Why create a new program? In spite of extensive research into the available programs no suitable one was found that would meet the requirements for Free Schooling. It had to be free, a teacher could not be expected to pay for a program they may only use once. Also, the source code has to be available so that specialized modules can be added. Most of the game development programs tend to be geared for the dungeons and dragons type of game and are not generalized enough for Free Schooling.
Freeplay and Chronogears are both written in java. Java has many advantages. The development systems are free, it is a very 'clean' language and the most important, java programs can run on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and just about every computer/operating system combination without change. The main disadvantages are the requirement for downloading and installing the run time and the slower execution of java compared to say C++. Modern computers and java execution are quite acceptable for the Freeplay program.
The scripting language embedded in Freeplay is Python. This is a (relatively) easy to learn language yet is sophisticated enough to satisfy advanced programmers.
Chronogears
This is the low level sprite engine used by Freeplay. It is a stand alone toolkit in its own right. Chronogears is an open source project started by Jean-Francois Bilodeau and has subsequently been taken over by the Free-Schooling team and is hosted on this site.jsynth
This is a pure java text to speech (TTS) library. The quality is not quite as good as current commercial TTS products but it is completely understandable. The library is very lightweight, 59KB for the version without a dictionary and 1.4MB for the version with the Carnegie Mellon pronunciation dictionary. The dictionary improves the quality somewhat. The interface to the library is a very minimal subset of the JSAPI (Java Speech API). It implements plain text speech and the 'wordStarted' callback of SpeakableListener. There is a test program in the source code zip which shows how the library can be used.This library is begging for somebody to turn it into a proper project. It can be improved in speech quality and JSAPI implementation. Are you the person who would like to run with it?
Go to the downloads page to get your copy of jsynth.
jsynth is released under the GLPL.
Want to help?
We are currently looking for a few people to assist with this project. There are many areas where some help would be greatly appreciated. These include writing java code, packaging the distributions, writing documentation, maintaining the web site and a million and one other jobs.Somebody with Macintosh knowledge would be a great help in testing and also documenting installation procedures for that family of products.
Please contact us if you are interested in helping.