On 08/06/2012 01:13 PM, Alan Young wrote: > My son is *way* behind on his spelling words. I'd like to force him to > do some spelling words whenever he logs in to the computer. > > E.g., he logs in. Instead of his regular window manager he's > presented with a spelling test program where he has to spell all the > words correctly before he can continue. Once he's spelled all the > words correctly he can then go on to whatever he was going to use the > computer for. > > Can anyone give me any pointers on how to do this? I have some ideas, > but I'm not confident in how valid they are, nor how to implement > them. I have a similar problem with my kids not wanting to do their daily reading before playing on the computer. Something like this that asked multiple-guess questions about the story based on where in the book they should be on that date would be great. Then if they read ahead and finish the book early, or improve their reading speed, comprehension, and retention, they get some discretionary leeway incentive in reading a particular day or not; like reading credits. But if they fall behind, they are forced to catch-up before being allowed to play (Mua-ha-ha-ha!).
Now I'm _really_ liking this idea as it removes the parent from position of bad guy, and repetitive password entry troll (like when they go to the bathroom or lunch and the screen-saver re-locks the computer). And it keeps track of their reading progress by way of syslog events ( Johnny logged in on "date" => Johnny read to at least the part where Harry gets the girl. It would also be nice to query a community-submitted list of questions and page mappings so parents everywhere could offload the homework enforcer role. Since I use MythTV, I might be able to use it to enforce homework-before-tv rules as well (ignoring the eventual problem of older sibling-assisted circumvention). The general idea feels a little like a form of multi-factor authentication, and I'm wondering if a PAM module (maybe pam_script or pam_exec) would be able to do this. I haven't messed around with my PAM config much, so there's also the question of if it could be used for this purpose. If those didn't cut it, maybe a new "pam_quiz" module could do it. Grazie, ;-Daniel Fussell /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
