[Sugar-devel] Helping with activity development

[Wade Brainerd]

Hi Marco, Yifan!

Absolutely, there are a ton of activities which could use help right
now.  I'll throw out some options and you can pick the one you think
would be best suited to your skills:

Labyrinth - Mind mapping activity.  Gary is currently leading the port
of this PyGTK program to Sugar, it's current at an alpha stage I
think.  Mind mapping software has been specifically requested by
teachers at deployments.  Labyrinh needs help improving and extending
the user interface, so PyGTK skills would be important.  Or,
collaboration would be a great addition!

Typing Turtle - Touch typing activity with a turtle mascot.  We are
developing activity this with the Nepal and Afganistan deployments.
Peru has also requested this activity as a high priority.  TT is in
pre-alpha but is close to its first release.  Help is mostly needed
testing and fixing the activity for use with foreign languages, and
developing the lesson builder script.  GUI programming experience is
not critical, but Python skills and i18n knowledge, as well as the
ability to work in a language other than English would be very useful.

Math - Another request by the Peru deployment is simple math games.  I
have started working on some math puzzles with Peter Moxhay, based a
suite of Java lessons he wrote in the past.  These are very early in
development but there are a lot of games to write.  Also, examples are
available, so it's really just porting and the work goes quickly.

Another job which would have a big impact would be the SWF and Web
activity launchers.

SWF: The Nepal deployment have created a suite of Flash based learning
activities but are currently having to jump through many hoops to
package them correctly.  We would like to have a 'swf-activity'
launcher written in Python, which creates a fullscreen activity window
and launches Gnash in the window with a .SWF file.  This launcher
would then be used to easily make activity bundles out of SWF files.

Web: Other deployments are using HTML+Javascript+CSS to make learning
activities, but they currently have to be installed using the Library
Collection feature of Sugar which is not well developed.  We would
like to build a 'web-activity' launcher script which allows Web based
activities to be first class activities.  This work would involve
making a new framework out of the source code to the Browse activity.
If you're interested, I can forward you a long email I wrote about
this task.

As you (and everyone) can see, there are a variety of high impact
activity development tasks that can be done in the next weeks and will
affect hundreds, if not thousands of children in the short term.  More
will become apparent as we make talk with the deployments and find out
what their needs are.

I will collect these and other high impact activity development tasks
at http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/TODO.

Best,
Wade


On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
<marcopg at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> Hi Wade, Gary,
>
> Yifan would like to help out with activities development. She is
> already somewhat familiar with the activities framework and she would
> like to build an activity which is useful, or to contribute to the
> development of existing ones. Do you guys have ideas about projects
> she could take on?
>
> Cheers,
> Marco
>