[Sugar-devel] New activity: Arithmetic.

[Christoph Derndorfer]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 6:42 AM, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Over the last few Sunday afternoons, Ben Schwartz, Michael Stone and I
> have been hacking on a new activity.  It's a collaborative arithmetic
> quiz, and extensively uses Ben's "groupthink" collaboration module.
> Here's a link to a bundle:
>
> http://activities.sugarlabs.org/downloads/latest/4204/addon-4204-latest.xo
> http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4204
>
> The game tries to show all the participants the same questions at the
> same time, gives an ongoing scoreboard of how many questions each
> participant has answered correctly, and measures the amount of time it
> takes everyone to answer each question.  It also lets the group choose
> which of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division their game
> should use, and how hard the questions should be.
>
> We think it's pretty fun already, but it still needs plenty of work,
> and we'd love to have help with it.  Some obvious next steps are:
>
> * Artwork!  We haven't spent any time making it pretty.  If someone
>  wants to go ahead and rip everything apart and put it back together
>  in a way that actually looks attractive, that would be awesome.
> * Looks like I messed up the logo in Inkscape, and it doesn't have
>  the correct stroke_color references.
> * It crashes when resumed, as opposed to launched with "Start".
>  Haven't looked into that yet.
> * Gettextification and translations.
> * An algorithm for scoring that depends on how quickly an answer is
>  given.  (One idea could be that you get 9 points if you answer with
>  9 seconds left, down to 1 point for answering with 1 second left.)
> * A natural end to each "round", perhaps involving giving out "medals"
>  (just as Typing Turtle does) for achievement to the participants.
> * There may still be cases where it shows entirely different questions
>  to the participants, instead of everyone seeing the same ones, and
>  we'd like to know about that so we can fix it.
>
> If anyone's in a position to get feedback from kids on whether playing
> this collaboratively is fun, and what might make it more fun, that'd
> be really good to hear.  We'd welcome everyone's changes to the
> activity; we can always back out a change if it needs to be discussed
> more, so don't be shy about pushing changes to a branch or asking for
> direct commit access.  (If there's some way to allow anyone with an SL
> gitorious account to commit directly, that would be an ideal setup.)
>
> The GIT tree contains groupthink referenced as a submodule, so to
> check it out:
>
> git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/arithmetic/mainline.gitArithmetic.activity
> cd Arithmetic.activity
> git submodule init
> git submodule update
>
> Thanks!
>
> - Chris.


Very cool activity indeed, thanks for the great work! :-)

I've just spent some minutes toying around with it in two VirtualBox
machines, one of them running SoaS strawberry with the other one using
Sebastian's 0.85.1 SoaS snapshot from last week.

The two main things I noticed are:

* there should be some sort of start button to get the quiz started, I felt
quite an adrenaline rush when I started the activity and saw the clock
ticking away immediatedly
* there seems to be quite an issue with syncing collaboration because
initially the activities on both virtual machines were off by maybe half a
second or so but after leaving them running for 10 minutes the difference
had increased to more than 6 seconds.

Bryan also asked me to show the activity to the folks here at the OLE Nepal
offices so if I get any feedback from them I'll forward it to you.

Cheers,
Christoph

-- 
Christoph Derndorfer
co-editor, olpcnews
url: www.olpcnews.com
e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com
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