<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 6:42 AM, Chris Ball <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cjb@laptop.org">cjb@laptop.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> Hi,<br> <br> Over the last few Sunday afternoons, Ben Schwartz, Michael Stone and I<br> have been hacking on a new activity. It's a collaborative arithmetic<br> quiz, and extensively uses Ben's "groupthink" collaboration module.<br> Here's a link to a bundle:<br> <br> <a href="http://activities.sugarlabs.org/downloads/latest/4204/addon-4204-latest.xo" target="_blank">http://activities.sugarlabs.org/downloads/latest/4204/addon-4204-latest.xo</a><br> <a href="http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4204" target="_blank">http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4204</a><br> <br> The game tries to show all the participants the same questions at the<br> same time, gives an ongoing scoreboard of how many questions each<br> participant has answered correctly, and measures the amount of time it<br> takes everyone to answer each question. It also lets the group choose<br> which of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division their game<br> should use, and how hard the questions should be.<br> <br> We think it's pretty fun already, but it still needs plenty of work,<br> and we'd love to have help with it. Some obvious next steps are:<br> <br> * Artwork! We haven't spent any time making it pretty. If someone<br> wants to go ahead and rip everything apart and put it back together<br> in a way that actually looks attractive, that would be awesome.<br> * Looks like I messed up the logo in Inkscape, and it doesn't have<br> the correct stroke_color references.<br> * It crashes when resumed, as opposed to launched with "Start".<br> Haven't looked into that yet.<br> * Gettextification and translations.<br> * An algorithm for scoring that depends on how quickly an answer is<br> given. (One idea could be that you get 9 points if you answer with<br> 9 seconds left, down to 1 point for answering with 1 second left.)<br> * A natural end to each "round", perhaps involving giving out "medals"<br> (just as Typing Turtle does) for achievement to the participants.<br> * There may still be cases where it shows entirely different questions<br> to the participants, instead of everyone seeing the same ones, and<br> we'd like to know about that so we can fix it.<br> <br> If anyone's in a position to get feedback from kids on whether playing<br> this collaboratively is fun, and what might make it more fun, that'd<br> be really good to hear. We'd welcome everyone's changes to the<br> activity; we can always back out a change if it needs to be discussed<br> more, so don't be shy about pushing changes to a branch or asking for<br> direct commit access. (If there's some way to allow anyone with an SL<br> gitorious account to commit directly, that would be an ideal setup.)<br> <br> The GIT tree contains groupthink referenced as a submodule, so to<br> check it out:<br> <br> git clone git://<a href="http://git.sugarlabs.org/arithmetic/mainline.git" target="_blank">git.sugarlabs.org/arithmetic/mainline.git</a> Arithmetic.activity<br> cd Arithmetic.activity<br> git submodule init<br> git submodule update<br> <br> Thanks!<br> <br> - Chris.</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Very cool activity indeed, thanks for the great work! :-)</div><div><br></div><div>I've just spent some minutes toying around with it in two VirtualBox machines, one of them running SoaS strawberry with the other one using Sebastian's 0.85.1 SoaS snapshot from last week.</div> <div><br></div><div>The two main things I noticed are:</div><div><br></div><div>* there should be some sort of start button to get the quiz started, I felt quite an adrenaline rush when I started the activity and saw the clock ticking away immediatedly</div> <div>* there seems to be quite an issue with syncing collaboration because initially the activities on both virtual machines were off by maybe half a second or so but after leaving them running for 10 minutes the difference had increased to more than 6 seconds.</div> <div><br></div><div>Bryan also asked me to show the activity to the folks here at the OLE Nepal offices so if I get any feedback from them I'll forward it to you.</div><div><br></div><div>Cheers,</div><div>Christoph</div> <div> </div></div>-- <br>Christoph Derndorfer<br>co-editor, olpcnews<br>url: <a href="http://www.olpcnews.com">www.olpcnews.com</a><br>e-mail: <a href="mailto:christoph@olpcnews.com">christoph@olpcnews.com</a><br>