[Sugar-devel] Physics activity (Was: Release v3 tonight?)

[Asaf Paris Mandoki]

>
>
> Think we need to make a call on the stability of the new Physics Journal
> state format first, or at least make sure everyone knows the storage format
> may (or may not) be stable long term (hate to see a bunch of folks
> generating/posting examples for lesson plans only to have them all fail to
> resume in a few versions from now).


Are we talking about doing something like this?

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Physics_File_Format
(See also the discussion)

I think the format described there is much too elaborate for our needs
although the right thing to do is implement it at the elements level and
that may require to do more than what we really need for this activity.

 JSON sounds like a good option for the format. I'll look into the api we
have available.


>
>  I also suggest scheduling an IRC meeting to discuss some "long" term plans
>> about what we're going to do and how we're going to do it.
>>
>
> Yes, an IRC meeting sounds like a good idea. I'm usually only on IRC for
> specific meetings so we'd need to pick a time. Perhaps we could make it a
> Physics specific ActivityTeam meeting on Friday, some other interested
> parties may join the discussions?


Friday is only good for me if we do it around 3pm GMT.


>
>
>  I'm thinking about adding some sort of goals and objectives but I'm not
>> sure if there is where we want to go.
>>
>
> Well need to chat :-) but the X2o Activity seems like the place for driving
> "goals and objectives". I see Physics as more the open ended sand box for
> experiments, like a simple Paint tool for physics simulations.


That sounds good to me. I'm thinking about how to include some curriculum
content into the activity and we could do this by distributing prefabricated
contraptions that demonstrate some specific physical concepts or machines.
We should also start considering adding some sort of Save/Load state so it's
easier to test tweaks to a contraption.

We need to keep an eye on the usability for younger kids, the number of
> tools is probably about right, but I have been looking at the idea of adding
> more options as secondary palettes, i.e. you hover over the circle tool and
> the palette includes extra options for "helium balloon", "rubber ball",
> "wooden ball", "stone ball"  for some pre-set material types, this would
> vary depending on the tool, so the motor could perhaps have clockwise and
> anti-clockwise as well as some torque settings (strong, medium, weak).
>

I was thinking on adding a toolbar at the bottom to modify the properties of
a selected object. This could also alter the properties of newly created
objects. And if the background is selected you can modify the world
properties. The problem with this is that we need a select tool but we could
integrate it with the move tool.  I'll try to give this some tought before
Friday.


> If you can get some more friends to add translations that would be great
> :-)
>
>
I got them to add German and French but I still need to review the French
because he posted them as suggestions.

I think that the translator comments need to be more descriptive.


>  On 12 Jul 2009, at 22:39, Gary C Martin wrote:
>>
>>> How stable do you think the save format is? Using pickling might leave us
>>> at the mercy of changes in the box2d object structure. Once we release
>>> Physics-3 we'll want to be reasonably comfortable that the Journal entries
>>> it creates will continue to resume with future Physics releases.
>>>
>>
>> I didn't think about portability between box2d versions. I guess the only
>> way to ensure this is to manually generate a JSON structure of the world and
>> then save it. Maybe it's worth doing.
>>
>
> I don't know enough about the box2d pickling solution, did you see any
> mention of it when you were researching?
>

I didn't see anything that guarantees the compatibility with future
versions.

Greetings,
Asaf
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