On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 10:29:52PM -0700, Edwin Pilobello wrote:

> In your expert opinion, will SQUEAK work, specially with kids?  

That´s what Squeak was made for... 
BJ Allan-Conn and Kim Rose are using Squeak to teach math and science
to 4th and 5th grade students. Have a look at http://squeakland.org
for more information. You can find there some of the projects done
in squeak by the kids. 

Squeak should be a good environment for your projekt. 

Here are some random thoughts:

-> eToys

"etoy" is the environment that´s perfekt for younger kids. No typing,
no compiling, programming simply with "drag and drop". I think you
should have a look at building an eToy-environment for the talking head. 

->How to programm the serial port? --> have a look at class "SerialPort" 

->Speech Synthesis
  Squeak has simple speech-sythesis allready build in:
  Try "Speaker child say: 'hello'"

->Phonem Recognizer: class PhonemRecognizerMorph
 "I am experimental phoneme recognizer. My approach to phoneme recognition
  is fairly crude, but the goal is not full speech recognition, but merely 
  a close enough approximation to drive the mouth of an animated character 
  from speech input."

->Talking Heads
  There are allready two "virtual talking heads" in Squeak: The image
  comes with a 2D talking head: (Speaker manWithHead say: 'hello'.)
  Luciano Notarfrancesco (I think) did a very nice 3D animated face
  (I think it´s "Avatars.002.or" on Bobs Superswiki, but I have no
  fast connection to try this).
  Screenshot at http://software.freepage.de/cronos/download/squeak_speech.gif   

Squeak should be much more fun for the kids than VB... you could build a 
"talking head etoy" which can use a virtual head if the hardware is not there. 
So the children can programm at home, show their work to their parents, etc.
And they can publish the project on the web.

          Marcus