[Sugar-devel] FUDCon hackfest proposal: assessment

[Sean DALY]

My son (nearly 5) was suprised that there was no "celebration" on
successful completion of Maze and Memorize levels, which is a comment
on how often he has looked over his big brother's shoulder while
playing Nintendo DS games. The first couple of times, he even asked me
if he really had completed the level correctly (!)

One of my all-time favorite "rewards" was in Pac-Man, where the solid
outlines would blink a couple of times on completion... and run a cute
little animation every 3 levels or so, a chance to rest the eyes &
brain.

My older son when he was smaller (6) loved a kids' magazine CD-ROM
game where a little bear would jump up and down and wave his arms when
a maze level was completed; he would ask to play by saying "I want to
make Sam the bear happy"

I feel easter eggs are vital, not only because they are fun, but
because finding them and knowing where they are builds confidence that
one knows one's computer, that it's a safe place with surprises.

Sean

P.S; In my misspent youth I distinctly remember the day I topped a
million in Defender: the planet exploded, all the landers turned into
mutants, every shot generated an extra ship and the console made a
terrific racket... the whole bar got excited about it, and I sold the
game with 300 lives to a patron for $10 which was a lot of money for
me in those days... I later read that the developer had programmed
that never imagining that anyone would reach that level



On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 2:42 AM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> On 18 Jun 2009, at 15:10, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
>
>> Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>>> 0. I'm guessing there will be some simple API, maybe
>>> "sugar.activity.assess".  Or maybe it's actually part of datastore.
>>
>> The obvious thing, to me, is to store it in the Datastore object's
>> metadata properties.  Perhaps two integer fields, "score" and
>> "maxscore".
>> No new API required, just a naming convention for these two
>> properties.
>
> I'd like to be able to have an Activity store arbitrary awards. This
> way authors can provide unexpected easter eggs for learners to
> discover (the trick is to have both obvious and unexpected awards).
> There was a fair amount of discussion of this at SugarCamp Paris some
> mockups and write-ups (that I still haven't posted) and several recent
> threads here and IAEP (I think) between me and David Van Assche.
>
> Think (very roughly), in Write while sharing a document "New Award!
> You and 3 or more friends each wrote 300 words." In TurtleArt "New
> Award! You've now tried all the tiles in TurtleArt.".
>
> There should be a way of viewing all your awards (and hints as to some
> missing ones), much like in most game design these days. Likely the
> best place is in a new Journal view, but only once the idea is proven
> to be a positive one (there's a lot of friction adding anything new to
> Journal due to the long term maintenance overhead).
>
> I'm pretty tied up just now, hopefully David will kick in :-) If not I
> might catch up on this next week.
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
>> --Ben
>>
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