Growing Up With Nell
Chris, Michael, and I just submitted a short paper describing our work on the XO-3 Nell project to this year's Interaction Design and Children conference. Give the preprint a read: Growing Up With Nell: A Narrative Interface for Literacy [pdf].
We're hard at work implementing Nell. We could use help in a number of areas: art, animation, story, user interface, javascript hacking, and probably others. For example, at the moment Chris and I are: drawing the characters, drawing user interface concepts, writing silly alphabet stories, animating the silly alphabet stories, doing the CSS/HTML layout to mock up designs, making some of the mock ups into functional demos, implementing HMM-based handwriting recognition in JavaScript, porting pyaiml to JavaScript, implementing an Apple Guide-style contextual help system on top of HTML widgets, and writing a integrated story editor (and stories about the story editor). I'd welcome volunteers for any of these tasks!