This project would not have been made without the hard work, dedication and efforts of Nasser Giacaman, Catherine Watson, Valerio Terragni and all other lecturers and tutors who were involved in the running of the SOFTENG 206 course at the University of Auckland in 2021.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to group members Julie Kim and Juwon Jung for the strong dedication, passion and commitment to this project. Without you, this project would not have been possible. You had been dedicated to our numerous all-night trio-programming sessions, without fail, dedicated to project completion and quality. You had always shown up on-time for our almost-daily meetings and catch-up sessions. You never waited to seek for and provide assistance to one another, always jumping on to Discord calls as soon as time permits. The diligence that we had exhibited towards our common goals and aspirations for this project has paid off, earning our team First Place in our cohort of around 120 people.

This project has earned recognition in the SOFTENG 206 course in Semester 2, 2021 by gaining First Place.

In this year, around 120 students were divided into groups of three (with one group having two members), resulting in roughly 40 teams. Each team were to build a Māori spelling app ("Kēmu Kupu") for an age group from a defined set from the course. The course defined a minimum set of parameters to be fulfilled, but it was up to each team to extend the minimum requirements and add enhancements to the final product as they see fit, particularly refining their software product for their chosen age group. Teams went through two "beta" stages and multiple Q&A sessions with the lecturers acting as clients to help them shape their product and steer their project direction, before the final submission.

Teams can participate in an optional competition conducted as part of this course. The competition involved pitching the final software product produced by each team as a result of undertaking this project to an external client, the course staff and students. The pitching took place around a week before the final submission. Around 10 to 15 teams opted in this year.

A total of four prizes were given out to participating teams, three of which were determined by the external client and course staff. The fourth prize was determined by voting students.

This is a product of a project as part of the course SOFTENG 206, a required course for Software Engineering Part II at the University of Auckland as of the Academic Year 2021. This project was overseen by lecturers and teaching assistants from the Department of Electrical, Computer and Software Engineering at the University of Auckland.

Kēmu Kupu is a JavaFX application that tests the user on spelling Māori words from a GUI. The software project aims to help young adults aged 18 to 25 from abroad learn more about Māori words and their spelling. The software is to be used in conjunction with Festival, a Speech Synthesis System developed by Alan W. Black, Paul Taylor and Richard Caley at the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) at the University of Edinburgh, with significant contributions from Carnegie Mellon University and other places.

GNU General Public License Version 3 or later
The program is provided with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.

To run the software successfully, ensure that the following software have been installed:

• Festival Speech Synthesis System
• Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 11
• JavaFX 11

To install packages, you may need root privileges. In that case, prefix the below commands with sudo.

Note that there are Māori voice packages for that can be used to enhance speech. They can be obtained from the University of Auckland.

festival is available from the default repositories.

apt install festival

JRE 11 is available as openjdk-11-jre from the default repositories.

apt install openjdk-11-jre

JavaFX is available as openjfx from the default repositories.

apt install openjfx

festival is available from the default repositories. Voices are available with festival-us and festival-english packages. See note above for Māori voice packages.

pacman -S festival

JRE 11 is available as jre11-openjdk from the default repositories.

pacman -S jre11-openjdk

JavaFX is available as java11-openjfx from the default repositories.

pacman -S java11-openjfx

One can get a copy of the JavaFX from https://gluonhq.com/products/javafx/.

Assuming that one has downloaded the JavaFX JAR files onto the following directory:

/home/student/javafx-sdk-11.0.2/javafx

then one can proceed with this set of instructions for running.

First, ensure that run.sh is given executable permissions for the current user.

chmod +x run.sh

Then to start the application, simply run the run.sh file from the shell, like so:

./run.sh

To run the program, first look at where the JavaFX files are installed by performing:

whereis openjfx

The result of the above command on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is:

openjfx: /usr/share/openjfx

As such, the path to the JavaFX JARs will be in the lib directory inside the path returned by the shell command:

/usr/share/openjfx/lib

In a shell window, perform the following command:

export JAVAFX_PATH=/path/to/openjfx/lib

where /path/to/openjfx is the path returned by calling whereis openjfx on your system.

Then run the following command:

java -Djdk.gtk.version=2 --module-path "$JAVAFX_PATH" --add-modules javafx.controls,javafx.media,javafx.base,javafx.fxml -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -jar assignment-3-and-project-team-23.jar

where $JAVAFX_PATH is the shell variable assigned before this command.