This is a set of animated onomatopoeic mnemonics to depict English phonemes and the mapping between phonemes and graphemes. The characters were developed for SpeechBlocks project. They are currently described in Sysoev, I. (2020). Digital expressive media for supporting early literacy through child-driven, scaffolded play (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), sections 3.2.2 and 6.6. A dedicated publication about the mnemonics is in review.
The animations in .fla format for Adobe Animate CC can be found in the source-fla folder. The animations can be converted to GAF format for use in Unity (see https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/animation/gaf-free-flash-to-unity-13593). Each file has two parts, labeled "story" and "sound" on a dedicated layer. The "story" part presents the legend of the creature: who it is, and why it is making its sound. The "sound" part presents the creature producing a target phoneme.
The sound-creature-catalogue.pdf file provides the list of the creatures, along with credit attributions. The following people contributed to the animations:
- Ivan Sysoev
- Allan Gelman
- Danny Gelman
- Jesso Wang
- R Ryan Hayes (Blackridge Studio)
- Abraham Tena
- Lingxi Li
Additionally, Ivan Sysoev express gratitude to Colin Cambell for teaching him the basics of animation.
Development of the animations was funded by internal funds of the Social Machine group at the MIT Media Lab.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
