Dan Wexler, in the Graduate School of Education, is also the Director of Technology at an elementary school in the Los Angeles area. He has an idea for a picture book application, which is educational software that would be used by children for creating picture books.
The picture book application has a simple text editor at the bottom. It contains a graphics library of objects, characters and backgrounds that the user will drag and drop into the main workspace. It has a simple paint program built in for creating and editing graphics. It will create multiple page documents. It will be able to layer graphics so the user can move graphics forwards and backwards in the layer order. It will be able to import graphics, and save projects as web pages. It should be kid friendly, with big buttons, intuitive icons, and a simple interface. Users should be able to share graphics. Imported graphics should appear in the graphics menu. Perhaps, inside the program's installation folder, there could be a graphics folder with subfolders, like people, animals, backgrounds, etc. Users and designers would create graphics and save them inside of these folders; then they would appear inside the program's graphics library, and users could drag and drop them into their projects.
A simple mockup is available.
Things that would be good, but are not essential:
Currently the dominant picture-book education software is Riverdeep's Storybook Weaver. The program has many severe limitations and bugs, which is the rationale for developing a better applications. Its shortcomings include:
The most important part of this project is getting the software right. The overall project also involves libraries of graphics that the students can drag and drop into the workspace, but this part can be deferred for later (unless you have some graphic design expertise you'd like to donate).
One candidate software platform for this project is Squeak. Squeak has some nice properties for this project: it can be installed via as a web browser plug-in, it can be automatically updated through the Internet, and it supports imported graphics and voice/music content well. Squeak has a BookMorph widget that should work well for this purpose, as it has multiple pages on which users can put stuff. If you have Squeak running, you can see an interactive tutorial of Etoys in a picture book format using BookMorph.
There is a multimedia app called Sophie that has been developed in Squeak. This application is much more complex than the application being proposed here. The picture book app would be for younger kids. Sophie would not work for elementary school kids. It is not a kid-friendly design.
If you look at the Squeak projects aimed at kids, most involve some simple programming. Again, these apps are much more difficult than the application being proposed here. Within the Squeak community, there doesn't seem to be anything aimed at younger kids. And certainly nothing that focuses on writing. Perhaps we can fill that gap.
Another candidate development environment is Java. The program needs to be OS independent, and have strong graphics processing capabilities, so Java would be a good platform.
The application will be used by Dan's students. There is the possibility that this application could be installed on laptops used in the One Laptop Per Child program.