An unparalleled computer graphics study guide for children has been released in Russia. The book contains only pictures and image icons, and not a single word, which makes it the first schoolbook requiring no translation.
All children are fond of looking at pictures and we decided to take advantage of this interest, says the book’s author Anatoly Pankov, a lecturer at the Omsk State University and the head of a computer graphics and design studio.
We just decided to create an ideal book for children - brief, simple and illustrated. But we never considered working on a world-wide scale. Imagine: we design a multimedia textbook in Russian and need to translate it into all the 6,000 languages spoken in the world. And what if we try to make a universal book for children, which would be completely needless to translate? In the long run, it turned out that this process involves 22 technologies.
As a universal language comprehensible without translation, pictographs were taken as a basis by developers to work out this manual. It took them almost 10 years to create a 10-page text-book. Notably, there are no generally accepted standards of teaching information technologies, even though this subject is part of any school program in Russia. We had to develop our own standards to release a series of such manuals, Anatoly Pankov goes on to say.
In the past 20 years, we created a total of 48 various study guides, only one of them completely wordless. A dozen others are still in a stage of development. We plan to distribute them combined with multimedia discs both in Russia and abroad.
The tiny 10-page book titled “The Children’s Academy of Computer Graphics” is intended not only for kids, but also for future designers in any country across the globe. No translation problems - no difficulties in understanding. This guide can be qualified under the so-called “quick start” category, providing children with an opportunity to create fantastic collages, calendars, landscapes, and 3D format interior objects.
The kids, who took an active part in the book’s testing, confessed that the language of pictures and image icons proved much more attractive and interesting than texts.The manual’s presentation will be held as part of the International Information Congress MIC-2010 due from 14th to 17th of September in Omsk, Western Siberia.
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