Norinori
Sumoscience
Sumoscience is a game for people who want to learn more about sumo. It models the physics (forces/collisions) between the wrestlers. You can do a frontal pushout, belt pushout, slapdowns, and throws. You can practice in the sumoobeya or try your skills in an osumoo tournament. In the sumoobeya, you can change the attack style and level of your opponent to practice how to deal with certain attacks. You can also select auto to watch the computer play itself. Although we attempt to make the physics realistic, it is pretty hard to deal with every possible situation and sometimes you will have strange situations that are fun to watch (e.g., flying sumo wrestlers).
The privacy statement is available here.
Dictionedit
Dictationedit is an app for practicing the pronunciation of foreign words. You produce a target word and the app uses Siri to transcribe your speech. Then it applies a metric called Levenshtein string edit distance to compare the produced word and the target word. This tells us how close you are to the target. It also records which letters you get wrong and this can help you to figure out which sounds are difficult. By practicing with this tool, you can improve your pronunciation.
The start page allows you to select the language and test file that you want to use. This tool was developed for Japanese students learning English, so it comes with Set1, which has words that Japanese people have trouble pronouncing correctly. After clicking start, you will see target word at the top. Press and hold down the Record key while saying the word. If the system can transcribe it, it will tell you how close you are to the target in edit distance. The statistics page provides counts of how many errors you made on various sounds.
The privacy statement is available here.
Jotflash
Jotflash is a flashcard program for learning visual materials that must be drawn or written. For example to learn Japanese characters, it helps to practice mapping from the sound (hiragana) or meaning to the written character (kanji). In this program, you can write on the screen to practice the character. There is an answer button which shows the target character and a clear button for starting over. When you are done, you can press the next button to go to the next item.
The program selects the next test item probabilistically based on how difficult you found the item previously. This is indexed by how often you clicked on the answer button. If you needed to check the answer several times, it shows that that item is difficult. If you want to practice a particular item more, press the answer button more. If you want to stop practicing an item, then do not press the answer button and its probability of being selected will be reduced.
Although it was designed for learning kanji characters, this program can be used for any topic where visual diagrams are needed, e.g., drawing chemical structures, electrical circuits, biological structures, or human anatomy.
Tracecolor
Tracecolor is a coloring program. You can take a picture and convert it into its outline traces and then you can color it as you like. It is designed to be simple to use for kids or older adults who enjoy drawing. There are small set of controls for pen size, opacity, and color selection. There is a zoom page to enlarge a section of the picture in order to focus on the detail in that section. Pictures can come from your camera, library, or our materials page. On the photo edit page, you can color over the original picture, invert the colors, or create an outline (there are various sliders for changing your outline). The program is free, except if you want to save your picture to your photo library, then you need to unlock the app on the materials page.
Digitspeech
Digitspeech is an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) app that allows you to say words by pressing buttons. It is designed to help people who have problems speaking clearly (elderly, children with development disorders). Speech is done with Apple's text-to-speech, so any word that is added can be spoken (26 languages are supported).
There is a keyboard typing page where sentences can be written and then produced aloud. These new words/utterances are also saved and can be accessed with a button press on the main page.
The settings page allows you to edit the words and their order. Emoji can provide some visual support for particular words. Button size is very important for people with movement difficulties, so the size of the buttons can be set by selecting the number of columns. And you can select the language that is used for speech. There is a limit of 10 words in the free version of the app, but if you purchase the license in the Store page, then you can add any number of words. Also, the license will allow you to save your words and settings, so that you get the same setup if you reboot the device. With the free version, you can use your 10 words with the columns and language settings for as long as you want.
The app can also be useful for second language learning, where you can press buttons to hear words in the second language spoken aloud. You can put a colon in the name of the button and the system will only produce the part before the colon. For example with French selected as the language, then pressing a button "Bonjour: Hello" would yield only "Bonjour" spoken aloud.