[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] New activity: Arithmetic.

[Caroline Meeks]

Hi Chris,

I had a crazy idea for Arithmetic yesterday.

Its a wonderful game for the GPA. Its exactly the kind of practice the
students at GPA need. Its collaborative and other people are a huge key to
engagement.

But as you said it needs a little something more to make it fun.  This may
not be technically easy but here is my idea.

Combine it with Physics.  Everytime you get an answer right you earn a move
in Physics. You get to put down a block or make a new shape or grab.

Super cool would be collaborative where everyone is working in the same
world either trying to build something together or just knocking each other
stuff around.

Scoring: with this we no longer need explicit scoring. I think scoring can
be discouraging if you are always the worst one in your class or you just
have brain that is slow to retrieve math facts. However, I think your moves
should expire, so if you are fast you have an advantage, you have more time
to think about and make your physics moves.  I think the goal is to
encourage the students to speed up their retrieval, but still have it be fun
no matter where you are right now.

Doing well and playing fast gives you advantages that are fun, but doesn't
set up a strict, I win, you lose dynamic.

Is a shared physics world among all the contestants possible? It might be as
good or better for some personality types if everyone had their own world.
Especially if you could see a picture of the other people's worlds.

A feature request is to save at least a picture of the world you create to
the Journal so we can use it in a Portfolio.  "I created this roller coaster
by knowing my multiplication facts on hard"


On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:57 PM, 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.
> --
> Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



-- 
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline at SolutionGrove.com

617-500-3488 - Office
505-213-3268 - Fax
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