[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] GSOC

[Sarah Frisk]

Greetings,

My name is Sarah Frisk.  I am working on finishing up my third year at Colby
College in Maine, where we’re finally able to see grass under all the snow
that has piled up this winter.  I’m a double major in Computer Science and
English with a concentration in Creative Writing.  The combination has been
fun, and somehow I still manage to find time to embrace my musical side with
the violin and tenor sax when I’m not programming or writing essays.  I am
familiar with C, Java, Javascript, HTML, TorqueScript, although lately I’ve
found that I’ve been programming in C a lot for fun – which is partly why I
was really excited about the Tux4Kids program.  I have some game development
experience, having taken several classes at Colby on both 2D and 3D game
design.  In both classes I also worked heavily in the graphics department,
and I have a background in both Blender and Photoshop. In previous projects
involving Photoshop I have used my Wacom to help create animated sprites,
backgrounds, and GUI (coincidently enough, it involved drawing a lot of
penguins and icebergs).   I am familiar with git, and I am taking a class
this semester that includes CVS as part of our 3d game development group
project.  I am familiar with programming on Linux (Ubuntu), Windows, and
Mac, although since I do not currently own a Mac, the majority of my
programming/graphics work is done on Linux and Windows.

I grew up in Maine, and both my parents work for the Maine public school
systems where the laptop incentive program has been in effect for several
years now.  My father has worked closely with the laptop program from a
technical side, setting it up, and working closely with finding various uses
for the laptops in the classroom.  The teachers at this particular school
have voiced an interest in educational games that can be used via a linux
server.  From discussions with both my parents and other teachers, I’ve
learned that an increasing number of middle school children do not know the
basic things I knew in elementary school, such as the names of the
continents and the oceans.  Perhaps this is because children aren’t finding
equivalents to the fun, engaging educational games I remember growing up
with, like “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”, “Carmen Sandiego Word
Detective,” “Spellbound,” “Math Blasters,” and the various JumpStart games.
These games captivated my brother and me for hours, and along the way we
were learning math, geography, art, typing, astronomy, history, and
everything else along the way.   TuxType already seems to be going in this
direction by have a word list of various plants, animals,and an astronomy
list; which seemed to suggest the desire to explore other areas of education
through typing.  It is because of this I feel drawn to projects that
Tux4Kids has to offer, especially the Tux Typing game as it appeals to the
English major in me.

I’ve seen various discussions on the boards for a ‘hangman’ type game to
help teach spelling.  If you chose to go in the direction of teaching
spelling (or at least help practice it), the capability of easily adding
your own word lists could be a good example of a useful tool (part of me
thinks I read the idea listed somewhere), a direction which I would be
interested in exploring over the course of the summer.  Speaking as someone
who struggled with spelling when I was little, I found programs where I was
forced to type out my spelling word lists out repeatedly help me prepare for
spelling tests.  Also the integration of a program that possibly analyzes
which letters the person playing the game is getting wrong more often, and
then perhaps let the player know in which areas they need to improve on.  A
further extension on this could be the word generators in the games then
generating more often words that have letters that are not in the player's
"Strong" category.  Has there been any sort of implementation along this
line, or could this possibly be an idea for a summer project?

I do think that Tux Typing could go farther than that, although it’s
certainly not something that can be completed in just one summer.  Possible
ideas include a game that includes typing that helps to explore the various
continents of the world, or famous cities, thereby helping teach children a
little bit about geography along the way.  Typing the wrong letters could
lead to something as simple as Tux not having enough fuel in his plane to
get from North America to Europe, for example.    Another one that I’ve
considered that would take the collaboration of many people would be the
possibility of encouraging reading.  Since Tux Typing is geared for younger
children, I could see taking Early Reader level books (stuff like "How the
Grinch Stole Christmas," the “I Can Read Books” series, etc), books with
text and pictures, and have the children have to type the text before they
go to the next page.  Obviously using stuff like "How the Grinch Stole
Christmas" has its own copyright issues, which is why I suggest that this
project has a much larger scope than just a summer project, since you would
need a large repository of stories and images to use that it would legal to
use.  But you could easily do a whole bunch of stories about various Tux
adventures. What does the community possibly think of an ideas like these
for future development?

I'm looking forward to the possibility of working with Tux4Kids for GSoC.

-Sarah
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/tux4kids-tuxtype-dev/attachments/20090330/fea3c4ba/attachment.htm