[math4] Class start-up

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Sun, 8 Mar 2009, 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.

/me blinks.

> 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).

/me blinks again.

> 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.

Wow.

> 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.

Wow again.

> 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.

The focus, at this point, is on taking a simple rogue-like and hacking 
"educational drills" into it.  Whatever the "tomes" look like, and 
whatever the "questions" look like, that's what the focus will be. 
Ideally, this should be completely config-file driven, so that content can 
be dropped in.

The vision is that "content / drill / assessment" can be complete within a 
single game.  Imagine running "mongo.py --module=4gm-fractions-2" and 
you'll see the direction I'm heading.

I'm *desperately* hoping to get something that shows what I'm talking 
about here in the next day or two -- but if not, I'll just upload what I 
have, and you can figure it out for yourself.  :)

> 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?

Go download and play "Mines of Elderlore" now:

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Mines_of_Elderlore

Now imagine that before successfully attacking any monster, or drinking a 
health potion, or performing some other important gameplay function, you 
must answer a question of some kind.  My emphasis was to find a Free 
Software codebase that was simple, in Python, already worked, and could be 
easily hacked.  Hacked being the key word there.

> 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.

Nothing at all.  :)

Mongo is my half-baked idea.  I think it's got some good instincts, but 
I'm certainly no game designer, and I am in no way married to it.  So long 
as the output is completely Free and Open Source, focuses on delivering 
educational content in a self-contained, modular way that clearly maps to 
concepts identified in curriculum frameworks, and is written in a language 
that the typical bright 14-year-old kid can hack (which is why I lean 
towards Python), I will be delighted.

--g

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