[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] GSoC TuxType Project

[Adam Goldstein]

Hi TuxType Team,

My name is Adam Goldstein and I’m a Junior Computer Science and East 
Asian Studies major at Brandeis University and I’m very interested in 
working with you all on TuxType for the Google Summer of Code. I really 
like the project a lot and after playing the game a lot myself and 
browsing through the code, I think I can do a great job on both adding 
more content to TuxType as well as providing in-game support for editing 
word lists and practice sentences.

I have been living in Kyoto, Japan as part of a program called KCJS 
studying both Japanese language and culture, and although I at first 
thought that I may not be able to continue any work on Computer Science 
while here, I realize I was entirely wrong. I’ve found that my interest 
in what I study stems largely from a passion for the idea of 
disseminating knowledge, and that has been relevant no matter where I 
go. My sensei asked me to make a flashcard program for my classmates to 
help memorize all of the vocabulary we have to learn, and even now 
everyone uses it for studying and for sending each other lists of words 
they find useful. I’ve spent hours inputting hundreds of words and 
phrases and even though I never imagined that sort of experience would 
come to be useful, it just happened to turn out to be perfect practice 
for working with all of you.

During my time in Japan I’ve been an English tutor for children, and 
before that, back at Brandeis, I did the same job but as part of the 
LACE club that taught kids who had recently moved to the United States 
from somewhere else. I’ve enjoyed every bit of it all and I think it has 
given me some unique insight outside of just coding experience that can 
help with the kind of fun and educational software that Tux4Kids develops.

In terms of technical work, during the school year I am employed as a 
web developer for my university. I have acquired strong skills in 
database structures as well as languages such as mySQL, TCL, XHTML, CSS, 
and Javascript. Two summers ago I worked with the Geico Underwriting and 
Product Management team and developed applications to speed along their 
work. With one other intern, I designed and developed programs with 
Visual Basic .NET and SQL to meet the needs of national managers and 
shorten weeklong processes down to automatic, overnight services. Since 
high school I have been programming primarily in Java for about 5 years 
and the Object Oriented skills and other lessons I have learned from it 
have really helped me to pick up other languages and combine them with 
my own problem solving ability to be able to quickly adapt to new code 
and projects.

Besides just talking about myself, I also really wanted to open some 
discussion about the actual project that I would like to do. I played 
TuxType a lot before writing this e-mail and while it really was fun, 
the issue which really stood out to me is one that you all have already 
recognized, which is that there isn’t enough diversity and depth in the 
content of words and practice sentences. I would really enjoy adding as 
much content as possible all summer, but I wanted to ask if the purpose 
of the game is just typing or if it is also for language learning. If 
the goal is just to improve typing skills, advanced word lists with the 
possibility of never getting a repeated one throughout the run of a game 
would be ideal. However, if the idea is also to help teach kids some of 
the words they are typing, such a large amount would not work as well, 
and a little repetition would actually be helpful.

Also, how exactly did everyone imagine the in-game interface for 
altering word lists? After making the small flash card program for all 
of my classmates, I’ve come to have a genuine appreciation for 
simplicity of data input. The big problem I had with other premade flash 
card software was that it forced you to fill in words with restrictive 
forms, and although they were helpful and had the user’s best interest 
in mind, it just slowed down the whole process. I think having a text 
area that is as simple as possible to work with would be best for 
in-game altering so that the process is as easy as possible, and we can 
then check for any malformed lists at the end once it is being saved.

In any case, I have a lot of questions, but I don’t want to ramble on 
forever. I’m sorry to write such a long letter, but I wanted to try to 
give a sense of myself and why I think I would fit so well with the 
TuxType team. I have the skills for it, I really enjoy helping to teach, 
and when it comes down to it, I just plain love typing games and want to 
contribute. I've also attached my resume to this e-mail for more 
information about my background. Thank you very much for taking the time 
to read this. I hope we can talk soon about the project.

Thank you,
Adam Goldstein