Speak Agent version 1.8 adds one new activity type and two major new features: multi-language support and learning badges. Here are the details:
Introduces the new Explain Your Work activity. This is a sentence frames activity like Tall Tales, but it's focused more on explaining how one arrives at a solution to an equation or word problem. It adds several new elements: an equation or expression, an image, and a visual word bank along the right side. Unlike in Tall Tales, this word bank displays all the time. It also incorporates categories other than parts of speech. Let us know what you think!- Includes a whole new Badges feature. Elementary students can now earn badges to celebrate their learning achievements. You will get an earful from us next week with more details about this fun and engaging new feature.
- Adds French language support. You can now find and create wordlists and lessons in French! We also support French text-to-speech and are building a number of early elementary lessons for math, science, and French as a world language.
- Enhances Spanish authoring. We've made it a little smoother to build lessons in Spanish. When you search our library of Read Alongs, Tall Tales, and Vocab Labs, it now filters for Spanish story games.
- Supports many other languages. There are many languages that we can now support upon request. The full list of languages is here. By "upon request" we mean that technically everything is ready to go, but we don't have content developed yet. We'd happily partner with you to build a multilingual STEM program or other interactive content!
- Hey, you skipped from version 1.6 to version 1.8. What exactly is going on here? Well, gosh, you sure don't miss a beat. Indeed there was a version 1.7 released in May 2019 that we didn't mention. That's because we released hidden versions of these new features so we could test them without causing disruptions in the teaching and learning experience at the end of the school year.
As always, if you have a brilliant idea or something that's bugging you about Speak Agent, we are listening! Just contact us.
Written by Katie Cunningham
Katie is CTO and Co-Founder of Speak Agent, Inc. A leading expert in the Python programming language, Katie designed the Speak Agent architecture and wrote the very first line of code for the current platform. She is an accomplished technical author and keynote speaker worldwide, as well as a leader of the Washington DC chapter of PyLadies, an organization dedicated to training women in Python.
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