[Sugar-devel] Fwd: Free From Malaria Game

[David Leeming]

Coming from a malarial region (and having had a few doses myself), and having taught for a few years in rural schools in the region, I feel I can contribute something here. 

 

Firstly, remember that the students and teachers have access to a range of media and variety of sources of information. In every day’s work, a teacher has to assess the relevance and accuracy of the information he or she is using for various reasons (preparing resources improving subject knowledge etc). A key skill here is “information literacy”. This is something I always encourage at the country team level, to consider information literacy training for teachers as part of their professional development. I know UNESCO is developing modules targeted at the teacher institutions, and they have published an excellent “information literacy primer”. The teacher has the role of facilitating or stimulating a process of local interpretation of the information coming in together with the students. It is certainly more important that there is a discussion in the case of health messages than in some other areas, but if one does not need to control everything centrally. For one thing, that is never going to be sustainable or scalable.

 

Leveraging the open nature of these resources and allowing local interpretations with subsequent adaptation of the content can actually make it much more relevant and the messages more accessible. As a form of OLPC  a form of community media, one could also consider principles of participatory content development at community level, with learner support, to widen the debate – perhaps involving local health workers - and then agree on some local adaptations. Perhaps one improvement to this excellent game would be to have it ask for feedback or have a way to annotate it with local messages etc. In this particular case, in my experience one has a lot of really well informed opinion at community level. The teachers will easily be able to pick up on details like the type of mosquito or the locally advisable best practices in regard to avoiding infection and eradication, and to refer to their community health workers in case they have some concerns. 

 

David Leeming

Solomon Islands

 

From: sugar-devel-bounces at lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel-bounces at lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of World Class Project- Dev Team
Sent: Friday, 25 June 2010 6:24 a.m.
To: James Cameron; Gonzalo Odiard; Joel Rees
Cc: Tabitha Roder; sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] Fwd: Free From Malaria Game

 

Hi James, Everyone

 

> It is important that the health message be controlled by those who are

> qualified to review it; medical professionals and research group

 

I agree with you about the need to peer review health messages. However all of the content, the story, the text and the guidance has been resourced and motivated from peer reviewed scientific sources, I will put all citations and references on the world class project soon this weekend.

 

Although we are not experts in Malaria research we are post-graduate students in biological sciences and have used our knowledge of the parasite and its epidemiology to construct the story. The health messages and guidance have also been sourced from UNICEF and WHO guidelines for malaria prevention, sometimes near ad verbatim. We would welcome reviews by health professionals however would like to note that the content covers the most basic/common knowledge of health messages with respect to Malaria prevention. 

 

> It is also important that Sugar Labs hosts software with a permissive
> license.

 

Our main concern is not about giving unrestricted creative commons access to end users, it relates to giving non-qualified people the ability to change the content, hence the creative commons restrictions on the images. The rest of the content, the software code, is open source and modifiable under GPL3.0 including the text of the story. 

 

> Perhaps this can be resolved by splitting the delivery software from the
> content.

 

I'm not quite sure what this means, however the delivery software contains the story book images, 2 games and maps of Malaria endemic regions. The only aspect that can be split is the text of the story.

 

If this is the general consensus I can separate the textual narrative into localized content, i.e. a customizable text file to allow users to change the text content of the story. Although this risks having unmaintainable versions of the game, with possible different and possible conflicting messages. That is why we originally hoped to have a single generic narrative applicable to all Malaria endemic regions, which is then translated into various languages using pootle. This way a single "approved/reviewed" health message is translated into various languages, we can then perform an additional review of these translations by more qualified people. So far we have received one commentary on the narrative which helped us get the health message across.

 

Joel

 

>Then it might make it less offensive/scary to generalize the name?

>(Generally, kids are pretty smart and you don't have to hit them over  

>the head with things like this.

>Their parents, on the other hand, ... )

 

Do you mean rename the game from FreeFromMalaria, is that what you mean when referring to scary/offensive?

 

>Anyway, and apologizing for not taking the time to try the game,  

>World Class Project 殿, are you considering making the game playable  

>from both sides? In other words, giving it both an attack mode and a  

>protect mode?

 

The 2 interactive games, in-between the comic are both attack and protect "mode". The first game is about attacking the host, the second is about swatting the mosquitoes and protecting from them until you "win" a bed net and window grill.

 

I hope this goes some way in addressing the concerns,

 

Thanks

World Class Project

 

 

 

 

 

On 24 June 2010 at 03:18 James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 09:04:37AM -0300, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
> > Developer without a name wrote:
> >
> > > The images are not meant to be modified since it contains material and
> > > information about health and we want to maintain the integrity of the story
> > > to the information displayed. All text is rendered as fonts and strings and
> > > a future release with Pootle annotation will be provided in order to allow
> > > translation and localisation.
> >
> > There are more disease associated to mosquitoes. In my country Dengue have the
> > same preventions and the game will be very useful. Probably there are more
> > situations where a modification of the game will be useful for a particular
> > deployment.
>
> It is important that the health message be controlled by those who are
> qualified to review it; medical professionals and research groups.
>
> Pootle translation may not be sufficient, since a translation won't
> necessarily be reviewed by medical professionals.
>
> It is also important that Sugar Labs hosts software with a permissive
> license.
>
> Perhaps this can be resolved by splitting the delivery software from the
> content.
>
> --
> James Cameron
> http://quozl.linux.org.au/
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel

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