Theater is a learning app for English as a second language students (ESL). The app can be played by two users (tested) or more depending on the number of characters in the play.
The app listens to the players as they recite their line and scores based on the number of words that Google's voice recognition software guesses right. This app is intended to make learning advance English fun. Its audience are intermediate to advance users. The requirements include consideration for use in a classroom where multiple Theaters can be created with multiple groups of students.
The app can be expanded to other languages. When released on the Google Play market, it will be for Spanish speaking students learning English.
AllJoy is used to communicate the devices over WiFi. One user sets up a "Theater" in much the same way a user creates a chat room. The other players can scan for Theaters and join one of them.
The app then prompts the Theater owner to select a play from the list (only "Polly Wants a Cracker" is included in the demo). Then both the Theater owner and the other players select which characters they want to play. After this the game starts.
The player can retry their effort, the number of tries is only restricted by the patience of the other players. At the end of the game, the winner is reported.
The basic use case has been tested. The app still needs polishing in regards to navigation, and GUI layout. Player name conflict, and character conflict are resolved in the code but it is not expected to work on this prototype, so each player must choose a different name and pick different characters.
English Theater, is the first of multiple multi-player learning apps design to speedup the learning process by making it fun.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to D. M. Larson for authorizing use of his plays for this app (http://www.freedrama.net/) Thanks to Jonathan Hedley for providing Jsoup(http://jsoup.org/ ), a library used to read html code as if it was XML. Thanks to Google and Qualcom and the Open Handset Alliance for build such robust open-source platforms
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