[math4] Class start-up

[Karlie Robinson]

Spectacular!  I'm so excited I wish I could write code - well maybe not 
that excited.  But still really excited

I'm sure you'll get more info from the guys on Monday on the programming 
questions.
~Karlie

Stephen Jacobs wrote:
> Ok folks, the course enrollment is now up to 19 students and may well hit
> the 25 mark (or beyond) before "add/drop" ends Monday the 16th.  The course
> meets face-to-face once a week on Fridays 10-12.  The first class will get a
> lecture from the other professor for the course, Eric Grace, on who 10 year
> olds really are cognitively, emotionally and how to target educational
> materials in general to work with that age group.  They'll also take care of
> the general first day of class housekeeping, go over OLPC as an
> organization/movement, etc, gotten their hands on the XO's I have at my
> disposal now (if the shipment of 25 hasn't arrived at RIT and/or made it
> through the intake red tape from RIT by then).
>
> By the 1st day of class they should have inventoried their skill sets (so I
> can build dev teams), read the pdf XO and Sugar manuals and taken a look at
> "A Byte of Python."  We have access to books 24X7 through the library and
> their are 7-8 additional Python books published in the last year they can
> get to as well.  The 20 students are divided between CS, Networking,
> Information Tech, Software engineering and even include a lone telecom kid.
> I'm still hoping to pull in a few more artistic ones as well during add
> drop. Most of these students are juniors or seniors in their programs and
> will have been out on coop working in the field, so it looks like a strong
> group technically.
>
> This course is a "Blended Course" which means much of the official course
> happens on-line, not in the classroom, so I'll be building teams to
> interface with community leaders and projects and the students will be
> expected to have the equivalent of 2 hours a week just interacting
> (live/e-mail, posting to forums etc) on-line.
>
> This will provide you with a strong pool of folks to prototype many
> different approaches to math materials in the first 1/2 of your 6 months
> exploratory development arc, both to work on "Mongo the Math Dungeon" and
> other game/interactive activity ideas whether they be in Python, Etoys or
> Scratch.
>
> In general, in the Game Dev corner of the world, it's best to do a lot of
> prototyping first. Ideally you churn throw away prototypes to use with
> target audience members that focus on gameplay, so you don't get too married
> to your first attempts. Scratch and Etoys are probably good for this as well
> as for development.
>
> I am absolutely interested in seeing some, if not all of the students
> working on Mongo.  I do have a bunch of questions about it, including the
> following...
>
>
> Is the focus mostly on math?  Vocabulary building as a second goal can be
> helpful, but can also muddy the waters if we're not careful.
>
> Graphical or text only? It might be helpful to shoot for a game that's as
> visual as possible, making it more portable across languages and cultures.
> Has there been much thought given to that as an option?
>
> Has there been much of an effort to see what's gone before when designing
> Mongo?  Have folks hit the ACM SIGGRAPH library on education and games, the
> serious games or games 4 change mail lists and archives to look at other
> efforts?  The students can be tasked to do a lot of background design
> research to help look at these types of things as well as do technical and
> content work.
>
> Looking forward to working with you all
>
> SJ
>
>
>  
>
>
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