The Elephant's Memory

February 26, 2002 2:50 AM

The Elephant's Memory is a beautiful logographic language oriented towards children. In late 1999, the creator wrote an article for Apple's Learning Technology Review[the PDF version is better illustrated] that goes into much more detail than the original site, which appears not to have been updated since 1996. A CD-ROM was in production, with a pre-release reviewed by Intellect Books, but I can't find any info on whether it was finished or is still available.
posted by Su (5 comments total)

Wow, Su - that's beautiful. My wife, Maria João, is a speech therapist who's been working with children(and adults)with Down's syndrome for the last nine years in a private, charity-based school here in Lisbon, called Crinabel.

Only two months ago they bought an expensive(about a thousand dollars)program, called "Sign Board" or "Show Board" or something(she isn't here right now and my Googling attempts failed)which has had an enormous positive effect. The director of the school, who started the school to care for her son, said it was the best investment they've ever made. So cheers for oft-maligned special-needs software!

It's basically a very simple but exhaustive sign-language, admirably multicultural. But this looks at least equally good. I'll get back to you as soon as she gets back from the school. I just wanted to thank you immediately. ;)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 4:11 AM on February 26, 2002

Yeah...that's amazing...
I really love these sentences, arranging information in two dimensions rather than as strings. This is really wonderful, thanks for the link. I'm sure I'll find some use for this in some project sometime or another.
posted by Settle at 5:08 AM on February 26, 2002

I'd uncovered The Elephant's Memory a few weeks ago(yeah, self-link) doing some weblogging on neoteny and visual languages.
There's an old article by Heather Champ mentioning it as a great 'tilde' site.
Some sort of Flash/Shockwave implementation (which wouldn't have been practical 6 years ago) of this would be really cool.
posted by twitch at 8:14 AM on February 26, 2002

Actually, the CD-ROM was being developed with Director, which has been around longer than it seems, although it obviously couldn't do nearly everything it can now. I'm not sure if that was mentioned in my links. I found several others(after much filtering of John Lennon, and a lot of clicking), but they were mostly short and didn't add anything much beyond those above. There's just next to no information on the thing anywhere, which is damn annoying.
posted by Su at 10:54 AM on February 26, 2002

Su: Board Maker was the program I was talking about.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 6:05 PM on February 26, 2002