Hi Chris,<div><br></div><div>I had a crazy idea for Arithmetic yesterday.</div><div><br></div><div>Its a wonderful game for the GPA. Its exactly the kind of practice the students at GPA need. Its collaborative and other people are a huge key to engagement.</div> <div><br></div><div>But as you said it needs a little something more to make it fun. This may not be technically easy but here is my idea.</div><div><br></div><div>Combine it with Physics. Everytime you get an answer right you earn a move in Physics. You get to put down a block or make a new shape or grab.</div> <div><br></div><div>Super cool would be collaborative where everyone is working in the same world either trying to build something together or just knocking each other stuff around.</div><div><br></div><div>Scoring: with this we no longer need explicit scoring. I think scoring can be discouraging if you are always the worst one in your class or you just have brain that is slow to retrieve math facts. However, I think your moves should expire, so if you are fast you have an advantage, you have more time to think about and make your physics moves. I think the goal is to encourage the students to speed up their retrieval, but still have it be fun no matter where you are right now.</div> <div><br></div><div>Doing well and playing fast gives you advantages that are fun, but doesn't set up a strict, I win, you lose dynamic.</div><div><br></div><div>Is a shared physics world among all the contestants possible? It might be as good or better for some personality types if everyone had their own world. Especially if you could see a picture of the other people's worlds.</div> <div><br></div><div>A feature request is to save at least a picture of the world you create to the Journal so we can use it in a Portfolio. "I created this roller coaster by knowing my multiplication facts on hard"</div> <div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Chris Ball <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cjb@laptop.org">cjb@laptop.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> Hi,<br> <br> Over the last few Sunday afternoons, Ben Schwartz, Michael Stone and I<br> have been hacking on a new activity. It's a collaborative arithmetic<br> quiz, and extensively uses Ben's "groupthink" collaboration module.<br> Here's a link to a bundle:<br> <br> <a href="http://activities.sugarlabs.org/downloads/latest/4204/addon-4204-latest.xo" target="_blank">http://activities.sugarlabs.org/downloads/latest/4204/addon-4204-latest.xo</a><br> <a href="http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4204" target="_blank">http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4204</a><br> <br> The game tries to show all the participants the same questions at the<br> same time, gives an ongoing scoreboard of how many questions each<br> participant has answered correctly, and measures the amount of time it<br> takes everyone to answer each question. It also lets the group choose<br> which of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division their game<br> should use, and how hard the questions should be.<br> <br> We think it's pretty fun already, but it still needs plenty of work,<br> and we'd love to have help with it. Some obvious next steps are:<br> <br> * Artwork! We haven't spent any time making it pretty. If someone<br> wants to go ahead and rip everything apart and put it back together<br> in a way that actually looks attractive, that would be awesome.<br> * Looks like I messed up the logo in Inkscape, and it doesn't have<br> the correct stroke_color references.<br> * It crashes when resumed, as opposed to launched with "Start".<br> Haven't looked into that yet.<br> * Gettextification and translations.<br> * An algorithm for scoring that depends on how quickly an answer is<br> given. (One idea could be that you get 9 points if you answer with<br> 9 seconds left, down to 1 point for answering with 1 second left.)<br> * A natural end to each "round", perhaps involving giving out "medals"<br> (just as Typing Turtle does) for achievement to the participants.<br> * There may still be cases where it shows entirely different questions<br> to the participants, instead of everyone seeing the same ones, and<br> we'd like to know about that so we can fix it.<br> <br> If anyone's in a position to get feedback from kids on whether playing<br> this collaboratively is fun, and what might make it more fun, that'd<br> be really good to hear. We'd welcome everyone's changes to the<br> activity; we can always back out a change if it needs to be discussed<br> more, so don't be shy about pushing changes to a branch or asking for<br> direct commit access. (If there's some way to allow anyone with an SL<br> gitorious account to commit directly, that would be an ideal setup.)<br> <br> The GIT tree contains groupthink referenced as a submodule, so to<br> check it out:<br> <br> git clone git://<a href="http://git.sugarlabs.org/arithmetic/mainline.git" target="_blank">git.sugarlabs.org/arithmetic/mainline.git</a> Arithmetic.activity<br> cd Arithmetic.activity<br> git submodule init<br> git submodule update<br> <br> Thanks!<br> <br> - Chris.<br> <font color="#888888">--<br> Chris Ball <<a href="mailto:cjb@laptop.org">cjb@laptop.org</a>><br> _______________________________________________<br> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)<br> <a href="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org">IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org</a><br> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep</a><br> </font></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Caroline Meeks<br>Solution Grove<br>Caroline@SolutionGrove.com<br><br>617-500-3488 - Office<br>505-213-3268 - Fax<br> </div>