PLEASE help - newbie quesiton

[Bridgette]

I have tried the demo version of 3dfa, and want to purchase it in the next few days, but I have to be sure that it will do what I need.
I want to create a typing tutorial program for students with physical and learning disabilities. What I need it to do is this:

If I type in a word or a few words...
Student clicks on word with mouse e.g. 'cat'
Then with a picture of a keyboard on the screen, the keyboard should show the key 'c' depressed, wait for student to press 'c', then show 'a' and wait for student to press 'a', then show 't', wait for student to press.

So - it would be a demonstration program, showing letters pressed in order, and wait for student input of each letter.

It seems like this program should do that. ???
Would it be done simply with elements like 'key up.jpg and keydown.jpg' and have different 'keydown.jpg's shown each time a different key is pressed? Or does it need some kind of scripting?

Any help would be MUCH appreciated!!!

Thanks
Bridgette

[dniezby]

I don't see why it wouldn't do this.
It doesn't seem to hard.

You would most likely need to use some scripting but it could be done I'm sure.

[carnwath]

Without a doubt 3dfa can do that sort of thing - and much more!

However you seem to have two ideas running in your questions

Do you

A) Want to have a student learn to type using the pc
B) Want the student to learn to spell
or what?

Using 3dfa programming, when the word is displayed on screen you can highlight, or turn on/off some kind of marker or underline of the letter when it is correctly chosen.

You will need to be able to do some simple programming in the 3dfa language to do string manipulation of the chosen word i.e. search the characters in the word to see the a typed character is correct.

Every key-down would search the string to see if its letter occurred.
Now you are into a kind of hangman game where you need to display every occurrence of the inputted letter.

Thats assuming you want to detect a keystroke

Alternatively you can have them type in a text box the word they see. So a student sees "potato" but types in "potota" and you then display their error politely on screen. Is that more what you want, its much easier, simply matching their input to the chosen word.

[Bridgette]

Thanks for the info. I'll buy the program now, just wanted to check that it would actually work along the lines I'm thinking. I've used Swish but it doesn't accept keystroke input.

I mostly want the onscreen keyboard to demonstrate keypress sequences and will probably have a picture / photo of hands on screen too to show which fingers are used for individual keys. I know there are many typing training programs out there, and I'm not wanting to reinvent anything, but this is aimed more at students with special needs, and those using alternate keyboard peripherals.

Thanks again.
Bridgette