Welcome to Pratyush's World of Learning

To jump to any section click on the link below:

Introduction

Getting started

Applet parameters

Manipulating the applet

FAQ
Copyright & more information

Introduction
I wrote this applet for my 11/ 2 year old son and for getting some hands on practice with Java programming.The applet proved to be very helpful in teaching him alphabets as it made the whole process of learning very interesting. This applet is very simple and easy to use and ideal for making kids of 2-4 years learn things while playing and at the same time getting used to computer. It is needless to add that while we may consider computers as a miracle or revolution but for present day kids it is going to be an essential component of life. So what else can be better than learning the first alphabets from the computer and commence the cyber journey - after all an early bird is more probable to catch the worm!

Getting started
To get started all you have to do is to double click the " main.html " while viewing the contects in file explorer . The applet will load automatically and you will see a layout of all alphabets in main view. Click on any alphabets and a window pops up with an enlarged view of the alphabet selected and after a pre-determined time of holding the pop up window will display a picture like "Apple" for "A". If you click on the pop up window at any point of time it will disappear. It will pop up as soon as you click on any alphabet in the main view. The time for holding of picture can be adjusted as the learning progresses, initially you may need to hold the picture for a longer time to allow the kid to grasp the details of picture and form some mental association with the alphabet. But later on you may decrease the time depending upon the response of the kid - and no need to worry as response time is not a measure of intelligence (definitely not the aim of this applet) as different kids have different pattern for grasping. To manipulate this applet to your liking read on.

Applet parameters
The behaviour of this applet is controlled by certain parameters, If you have never done any HTML editing then you may find the details given here a little scary but believe me it is probably easier the you ever imagined it to be (may be little learning for you as well ;-). The parameters are tabulated in the " main.html ". Here is a brief description (with default values given alongside) of parameters used although the names are descriptive enough.

Parameter name Function (default values)

total number of alpahbets to be displayed (26)
stop-time-for-first-pic time (1/1000th) in seconds for displaying enlarged picture of alphabet (4000)
stop-time-for-second-pic time (1/1000th) in seconds for displaying picture associated with alphabet
icon-width width of icons in pixels as displayed in main layout (50)
icon-height height of icons in pixels as displayed in main layout (50)
picture-width this is the width of the pop up frame in pixels that will come up on clicking on an icon (350)
picture-height this is the height of the pop up frame in pixels that will come up on clicking on an icon (350)

Do not set values of picture-width or picture-height too high as it takes lot of memory and amy cause problem with the applet.

See this one was not so difficult, to tailor the applet read on.

Manipulating the applet
Open the file " main.html" in a Notepad ( do not use MS Word or any other editor) . You will see the applet parameters like this

    <param name="picture-width" value="350">
    <param name="picture-height" value="350">

So if you want faster performance you can reduce the size of the image that will be displayed so you can set the values of above parameters to 250 and it will look like this

    <param name="picture-width" value="250">
    <param name="picture-height" value="250">

You may not believe it bu that is all, just save the file and reload it into your browser by double clicking and you can check if the changes are suitable to your requriements or not. Otherwise you can go back and change the parameters again. You may need to fiddle with the values before you get the right combimation as it will depend upon your hardware architecture, browser support for java etc. You may need to press " shift+ reload" button if you do not see your changes taking effect.

But you may have started to get impatient as what you want ot change is a picture and not the damn size after all. The pictures are contained in the images folder, this folder contains two folder namely

alph - contains pictures of alphabets as displayed in icons.
pics - contains the pictures that associated with the alphabets.
The pictures are names after aplhabets for easy identification

Now let us say that your kid will be more familiar with "Fish" for " F" instead of "Flower" as I have provided. It looks like a reasonable choice so you can do it in two ways.
1) Easiest thing would be to replace the " f.gif" file in pics folder with the image file of your choice and rename your file to "f.gif". The system would work fine as normal but make sure that you do not loose data if you are changing the file format from some file extension other than .gif.
2) If you are unable to change the file name for some reason, then look for the parameter like this in "main/html " file

    <!--parameters for pictures of objects associated  with alphabets      -->
    <param name="pic-f" value="f.gif"> here change the file name to whatever you want say " fish.jpeg" so now the line looks like
    <param name="pic-f" value="fish.jpeg">

Thats it!

FAQ
Q: The applet is not loading in my browser?
A: Make sure that you are using java enabled browser. If you are using Netscape 4.x or IE 4+ then you are in no trouble but make sure that you have enabled java. For more details read the documentation of browser.

Q:I have edited the main.html file and unable to fix it?
A: That's the spirit of learning - bravo! Open file backup.html ,it is same as main.html - believe me there are no more backups. So you copy this file as main.html for further experimenting and reserve the backup for moments such as these!

Q: A particular image file is not loading when I click on the icon?
A: Make sure that you have edited the html tages correctly as browser will not give any error in case of missing html tag but will proceed by simply ignoring the malformed tag.

Q: What file formats for image are supported by this applet?
A: This applet can support as much as the java machine of your browser can handle. I have tried .jpg, .jpeg & .gif. Other formats should work fine but I have not tried. Drop me a line if you dig up something new or weird!

Q:I have made some changes but the applet does not reflect the changes?
A: Press " shift+ relaod" to refresh the browser out of cache as cache may be outdated after you changed the parameter.

Q:Where can I get more information?
A; You can try my website http://www.pratyush.net

Copyright & other Information
This applet is distributed under GPL and comes with no gurantee whatsoever. The end user agrees to hold the author not responsible in any way for any damage direct or consequential. See copyright for more details.

I have made quite a few pictures used in this software myself using GIMP and the rest i have used from my vast collection that I have colected over last few years while surfing the net and through various other sources. It is not my intent to infringe anyone's intellectual copyright so please let me know if you have any objections to any of the material used here.

For anything else please contact me.