[sugar] Memorize Activity: exciting new ideas.

[Eben Eliason]

I've recently had some inspiration regarding the Memorize activity.
(The reason for which I refer to it as Memorize, and not Memosono,
will become apparent shortly.)

We should take serious advantage of the nature of the game - which
depends on matching pairs - by turning it into a flashcard style
learning tool.  Right now we've got some composers, with audio cues.
It's a step above average, but in the end, you just find the two cards
that match. What if instead, half of the cards were pictures, and half
of the cards were the corresponding words; or half of the cards are
numbers, and the other half are simple math problems that have equal
values; or half of the cards are pictures of instruments, and the
other half are their sounds, etc.  There are many variations on this
idea, and all of them would help teach kids a different skill.  The
simplest variation would be simple picture matching, which we should
keep for the young kids, but there would also be modes for learning
vocabulary, math, music, etc.

Additionally, expanding the dictionary of possible cards (by a lot)
seems pretty necessary, since the fixed set of composers gets old
after a few plays.  Each set should have a large number of cards, and
the cards shown in any given game should be chosen randomly from the
set when the game starts.

Now, getting to the really exciting issue, we should also make this
game extensible, so that educators in each country can create
expansion sets to install.  That makes it infinitely scalable to
different age groups, and removes the core problem of localization.
They can make the game relevant to their country, their age group,
their current topic of study.  Talk about a good way to study for
exams...the kids could even make sets themselves!

I think if there's any way to get this into G1, we'll have an
extremely powerful teaching tool that will be a great way for each
country/school to explore the mesh capabilities.  It also gives the
teachers a simple entry point for creating educational content,
disguised as an entertaining game. I'm a UI guy, and I'd be happy to
help out with the visual design for this.  Do those of you on the
implementation end of things think we can accomplish such a goal?  I
think it would be awesome, and go a long way to supporting the idea of
the laptop as an educational tool.

- Eben