SpiTux Project March 2003 Archive 

SpiTux Chosen Site of the Week

March 28, 2003.  The SpiTux Project website is featured as the site of the week on ArmeniaDiaspora.com!
 

Note of Gratitude from the Spitak Mayor

March 21, 2003.  Anoush, Karen, and Edik come to the Spitak City Hall to pick up a Note of Gratitude from the Mayor to Anoush for the SpiTux work.  Then, there is an interview for the Spitak TV and a meeting with the newspaper Spitak that's preparing an article about us.

Mr. Dilbaryan Hands Anoush a Note of Gratitude from the City

IREX/IATP Computers Come In

March 20, 2003.  IATP Country Coordinator Dr. Gregor Vahanyan and his team stop in Spitak to drop off a vanful of equipment.  This is the beginning of the IATP Internet Room at the Shogher Center.  The rest of the afternoon, our proud Gagik Petrosyan and David Shiroyan proudly help out Edik and Karen with the setup of computers.

IREX/IATPBrings Computers To Shogher Center

First Time Surfing the Net

First Time on theInternet!

March 15, 2003.  Our first day on the Internet!  The IATP has agreed to pay for a few hours of dial-up access over a long-distance toll line for the SpiTux kids.  We have a great time, overall.  The voltage in the neighborhood power lines goes up and down all day because of some repair works somewhere, so we're down to two machines: a laptop that runs on battery, and a desktop running off of a transformer.  We invite our kids' groups and the teachers' group, to come around in 45-minute chunks.  We do have connection problems, and the dial-up line is pretty slow  But it works!  Thanks to everyone who made it possible! 

Lilit Opens an Email Account for a Friend

We allow the kids to bring friends along -- as many as we can supply oxygen for in our little room.  We spend a lot of time on the Armenian Freenet where all our kids have email accounts, on the SpiTux site, and on some nice-looking/useful sites.

SpiTux Newspaper Invites You

March 14, 2003.  Since it looks like we'll be doing an Internet Day on Saturday, we transfer our regular Newspaper Lesson and English Lesson to Friday night.  Its' great to publish kids' works: it gets everyone else jealous, in a good way, and interested in writing something!  We have a constant influx of crossword puzzles, poems, and articles. 
 

Typing up the Horoscope

Inserting Crossword Puzzle

Speaking of which: if you, our respectable reader, are at school, and are wanting to get something published in our paper -- art, poetry, short stories, puzzles again, what have you -- send us your work!  Email is a good way.  Language your work is in can be anything we can read: Armenian, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, Spanish.  Depending on what it is, we may end up publishing a translation.

Website for Marie's Silk Paintings

March 13, 2003.  Our friend Marie is an artist who paints on silk.  She makes scarves, kerchiefs (is this a word?), and "just" paintings.  We've undertaken to make a website for her.  It's on Marie's beautiful digital photos that the kids from our "new" groups have been learning to scale and resize images.  Now, they're assembling the site!
 

Argam and Lilit

Araik and Norik

Coming Soon: SpiTux Site in Armenian

March 12, 2003.  We've been working on this for a while: an Armenian translation of the SpiTux site.  Thing is, one person is doing all the wirting for this site all the moment, which makes it kind of hard to maintain in two languages.  But the Boarding School students, as part of their Computer Science lessons, have been learning to make websites, so we figured, why not give them a real project to work on: translation of these webapages!  They're happy, we're happy!  We'll release the Armenian site soon.
 

Larisa and Tsoghanush

Marietta Translating

Virtual English Course HOWTO

March 8, 2003.  The International Women's Day -- an official holiday!  Business as usual at the SpiTux lab, though.  Whenever the schools are having a day off, we meet up in the morning.  This time, to record a few more English dialogs, and to combine the drawings the kids have made, and the voiceovers. 

So, how do you feel about this, for a Virtual English Course scenario: we start by singling out two dozen situations: At the Market, At the Post Office, etc.  The kids draw the pictures of the situations.  We and/or you make up the dialogs.  And then, our long-distance Enligh-speaking friends (you? write to us if you're up for it!) record the dialog, and upload it, say, to www.spitux.org -- and we download it, in Spitak.  The kids listen to it, carefully, you know, and try to record the same dialog themselves -- and then, maybe, make up their own dialog, a little different, just for fun.  Oui?  Non?  speaking of which, we can do this with French just as well!  French, anyone?  We do have Taguhi, a French speaker, ready to collaborate, on the Spitak end already!

The Newspaper group holds its meeting in the afternoon, and then, for English class, we talk about Travel.  And about getting lost, an indispensable part thereof.

Customer and Salesperson
by Gagik Petrosyan and David Shiroyan

Meet the Parents!

March 7, 2003.  We call the first-ever meeting with the kids' parents.  The kids are invited, too.  Our thinking is, none of our kids have a computer at home, so it would be good to have the parents come over and have a look at their works that only exist in the digital format -- such as the animations and the webpages.  We see lots of happy faces and say and hear lots of nice words -- let's do this more often!

Meet the Parents!

SpiTux Newspaper #4 is Out.  Make That Sold Out

March 6, 2003.  After a heroic effort by all involved, the next issue of the newspaper comes out prior to March 8 -- why is that so important?  Because there is a Happy March 8 card folded into it -- the kids have made it.  The paper gets sold out within hours.  Two shops in Spitak agreed to carry it.  Neat!
March 6: SpiTux Newspaper #4 is out!

Transatlantic Friend Speaks Up!

March 2, 2003.  SpiTux kids gather in eager anticipation of a visitor: John Davis-Cooke is in Armenia for a short visit, coming from Boston by way of the UK.  We schedule an activity to celebrate John's nice accent: kids make up small groups, and record dialogues in English.  They are working on little animations to be used with these voiceovers in a kind of a virtual English course.

Animations with English Voiceovers

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