[Sugar-devel] Helping with activity development

[Samuel Klein]

Let me add:

1. Making collaborative Maze even more awesome.

This is currently the most addictive multiplayer game on the XO, and
it needs a further dusting of crack, including better statistics,
handicaps, &c.

2. Making Speak collaboration effective.

This has the potential to be an awesome communication method; not only
a chat option for the blind but a way of teaching specific words, and
a fun way to engage small clusters of people around an XO -- sound
carries well to people who aren't currently reading the screen.

SJ


On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>