Olivia EischSpring Cleaning
I took this afternoon to do a bit of clean-up on my project. There were a few things that had been bothering me, but I had not taken the time to adjust until now.
The progress I made today on my project was:
ADJUSTING THE FOCUS OF EVERY BUTTON IN MY APPLICATION
This adjustment was extremely important if I want to use a hotkey, such as the space bar for the user to select things on the screen. The buttons, if clicked, would automatically stay on Focus, so I had to adjust this. Since you cannot remove the focus from a control, I instead had to redirect the focus. I found it most beneficial to redirect the Focus to a pictureBox because nothing would happen. If I directed it to the text box, it would highlight the text and I did not like that.
ADDING INSTRUCTIONS FOR FIRST TIME USERS
I added a button that leads to a new form with instructions for first time users. This is a simple form, but necessary if I anticipate other people using this application.
RESEARCH / ADJUSTMENTS OF DIALOGIC READING
I adjusted my dialogic reading prompts after doing a bit more research. Before, I prompted the user with a quiz-like question and had a button that would reveal the answer. Instead, I decided to choose from a variety of different prompts, such as recall prompts, open-ended prompts, etc. to make the user think more critically. I referred to this website for ideas when creating my prompts: https://www.readingrockets.org/article/dialogic-reading-effective-way-read-aloud-young-children#:~:text=These%20ask%20children%20to%20relate,the%20animal%20park%20last%20week.
REUSABILITY OF CODE
Making my code more reusable is something I really focused on this week. I was having a hard time with the length of the book because I have multiple 2D arrays that are dynamically allocated, and it is difficult to get the length from those. I then created a variable called "pages", and if a book was selected, it had it's own special page number variable, which I then set equal to "pages". This works very well for me instead of hardcoding the number of pages, as now I can have books of varying lengths.
What's Left?
As presentation days are getting extremely close, I am very pleased to say that my project appears to be almost presentation-ready. I have an out-standing question regarding how the book should be read, as I am going back and forth between having the user click each word, or having the sentence read back to them. Other than that, I am just going to add a few more books to the story, and continue to use the application to find any ways I can clean it up / make it more efficient.