Speak Agent version 1.11.1 adds improvements requested by our customers, fixes several bugs and issues, and introduces a new STEM activity!
Diagram It!
Please welcome our newest Speak Agent activity, Diagram It! This activity is great for STEM subjects. Students can review labeled diagrams, add labels, check for accuracy, and/or describe how they think the diagram works by writing or speaking. Speak Agent Math and Science products already incorporate Diagram It! into lessons.
Scrambled Sentences Audio
For elementary grades, we added an audio button for each scrambled sentence puzzle. Students can press the audio button to hear the correct, complete sentence narrated. This better integrates listening and sentence processing so that students focus on solving the puzzle, as opposed to guessing.
Username Display
For elementary grades, the student's username now displays in the upper-right corner. This is important on shared devices so that students (and supervising adults) can be sure they are signed into the correct account.
Activity Numbering
Previously, when students completed an activity it would be moved to the end of the lesson. This caused all the activities to be renumbered. We learned this threw many teachers off, because they'd tell students to work on activity #3, but different students saw different numbers. Doh! This was not our smartest design decision ever... But we're happy to report that we've made amends! As you can see from the screenshot below, completed activities now stay in position and the numbers no longer change.
Word Spin Saving and Previewing
The Word Spin activity now remembers a student's progress without having to press a Save button. In addition, we fixed a bug where some teachers were not seeing the spinner load during Preview.
Explain Your Work Fixes
We fixed various display and audio issues, such as unwanted line breaks and missing instructional audio in the Safari web browser.
Coming Soon
We are now beta testing two new activities for Math and Reading:
- Math Puzzle Maker will enable students to create word problems and other math puzzles for their peers in grades 3 to 8.
- Scrambled Words is a morphology activity that's perfect for emerging and struggling readers. It breaks words (and compound words) into "chunks" (syllables and affixes) that students reassemble.
We can't wait to share these new activities with you later this spring!
As always, if you have ideas about how we can improve Speak Agent, please contact us.
We are listening!
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.
