and i thought i'd create a prototype of an educational app for young (very young children).
Here's the prototype:

http://arcade.gamesalad.com/games/131497

Graphics are found on the internet and edited in Gimp.
Letters/Numbers/Shapes/Colors done in Gimp.
Sound effects (buzzer and ding ding bell) found on freesound.org.
Speech is done by recording http://www.naturalreaders.com (voice of Crystal speed -1).

What do you guys think of the prototype?

That's really nice, Wallace Tran. Little kids will have fun with it (I did, too). I think the speed can be made just a little slower. Also, sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference between B and D, but for the most part it was very good.

Good job!

is my profile that purple that you think i am Wallace
Do you mean speed of speech or speed of icons? They only speed up out of the screen if you get the correct one.
Also if you don't answer right away, when it reaches the top it starts out from bottom of screen again so you have many chances.

Oh, Tran, so sorry. I KNOW you are not Wallace.

I thought the icons were just a bit fast.

I just went back and tried it again. The icons are not too fast. The speech bubble is nice for repeating the icon name.

To get the concept across it's a good proto-type I've had game ideas for a while for little kids but never got up the courage to do them.

I think that the background goes a bit fast and also the icons you click. It hurt my eyes a little bit, and some children can have problems of siezures and stuff when that happens to them. Just a little slower would be good. Maybe not make it seem like they're falling so much? That's how it comes off to me. Dunno just what I noticed. The voice idea is a good one, and good to know about free-sound!

thanks for your input guys, much appreciated.
I will make the background move slower..maybe the background moving fast is making the icons seem faster they are.

Edit: I just slowed down the clouds. the blocks don't seem as fast now maybe it was an illusion of things flying by so fast that made the icons seem to move faster too at least to me anyways.

Mokonafan, i vaguely remember you asking for royalty-free music.
have you been to http://www.nosoapradio.us/ ?

It seems to never end.

I never even thought about that part of it Wallace..hmmm.

omd I think you hero'd it. Thanks!

Maybe there should be some kind of goal?
Another thing I noticed is that it only counts the hits and not the misses.

game tran. Only things I had problems with was the moving around of the blocks - (I often missed them using laptop touch pad) And I also couldn't easily distinguish the sound of the b and d.
@Wallace: A goal may be good but just getting all hits would be a goal.
As for the other very young children don't lose games, they only learn to play them.

if you miss only 1 point is take away. (maybe that's why you didn't notice the missed points)
if you get it right you get 3 points.

And I was thinking maybe after 100 points or so move up a level... where instead of pictures and letters/numbers/shapes/colors, you have to identify simple words so that children can learn how to identify written material.

I just thought that this app can also help non-english speakers to associate english words with pictures....
It's all part of my big plan to get the whole world to speak English .... joking aside though if everyone spoke English then i'll feel less a need to learn any other languages hehehe

It has a lot of possibility with variations and levels. One phase should not go on too long -- which brings up an interesting thought I had while playing with it, that it could (with manual speed adjustments) be made into a test for Attention Deficit Disorder. The wandering mind (mine, lol) will go astray between targets below a certain speed.

I asked NaturalReaders.com for permission to use their Text to speech voice in my app but they said "no"...so technically, this prototype isn't allowed.

I'll have to use my own voice for the real app (maybe change the pitch so that i sounds like younger male, my voice as is, is too deep).

Would this work? http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/

Thanks but I don't see anything on that site that mentions about copyright(s) plus it's a little faster than I was wanting.
So I have decided to go with my own voice (probably sounds more natural that way too).