I recently received am email (partly shown below) from the Technology Director of a small school system in Texas. It seems that he wants to include speech programming in the High School curriculum.
“We are adding programming to an existing course at our High School next year. This course is going to be different because programming is not the focus of the course. The focus of the course is child development. We have already arranged for two teachers at the elementary level to work with the student groups to define and develop voice based games that reinforce concepts the teachers want the students in the 2nd and 3rd grade to practice. We really want want High School students to develop teaching games for younger students. Basically, I want to offer voice translation as a “service” to internal game developers within our network. I don’t care if the game is Flash or iOS..for now I just want it to work.”
I see this as a great opportunity for those of us in the field to help the next generation of programmers get involved with speech. I don’t have lots of free time but I have been helping him out some. But I would like to see this as a group effort. If everyone gave just a little time then just think of what these kids could accomplish and just think of the elementary students that would be helped.
If you would like to get involved then email me (marshall at got speech dot net) and I will make the connections for you. Think of how awesome it would be to mentor some High School student as a way of giving back to the community.
“No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child” (Abraham Lincoln).
I hope to hear from you and thanks for reading.
