[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [math4] Activity Awards, Activity Alerts

[James Simmons]

David,

Your suggestion got me thinking about how this kind of reward system 
could be used with my own Activities, which involve reading.  I think I 
have a notion which might be worth pursuing.  The biggest problem with 
reading on the XO is finding books.  The books are out there, but 
they're scattered all over the place.  What would be good is a kind of 
message board that has the following features:

1).  Allows learners and teachers to create their own accounts.  They 
would need to log in to do anything on the message board.

2).  You would have forums based on grade level.  First graders would 
have a forum, second graders would have their own, etc.

3).  You could do the following functions:

* Submit a book review, which always would include a link to where the 
book could be downloaded.
* Comment on someone else's review.
* Award reputation points to someone else's posting.

Every activity on the board would win or lose you points.  Submit a new 
book review and you get points.  Make a useful comment and those who 
think it useful would give you points.  Report an inappropriate posting 
to the moderator and he could give you points for that.  Make an 
inappropriate posting and lose points.

The idea is to build a portal that links to age-appropriate books that 
the learners would maintain (with some adult moderation).  Once you got 
enough reputation points you would get some meaningful and 
reading-related reward.  Maybe your account would be granted access to 
the next higher forum.  Or you would be allowed to download something 
special.  Your avatar would indicate your status, so any time you make a 
post your post shows your current status (in other words, your status at 
the present moment, not your status when you made the post originally).

You could also keep track of the most popular download links, etc. so 
kids looking for something good to read would get some ideas.

James Simmons