New Game Activities: COBBLE, Space Tag and Cell Management

[Greg Smith]

Hi Mark,

I'm interested to hear feedback from people here, but you may be able to 
get feedback from teachers and kids with a little more work.

The most communicative user base is in South America.

You can get the most feedback by sending your request to 
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sur

You should send the e-mail in Spanish. Let me know if you want help 
writing or translating that e-mail.

You should also make sure your activity is available in Spanish but you 
can ask for help translating it on the sur list too.

If you need info on how to make it easy to translate your activity you 
can try the localization list: http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/localization

The main English language deployment is Birmingham, AL but they aren't 
up and running in schools there quite yet. Another smaller one is in St. 
John in the Virgin Islands: http://waveplace.com/locations/usvi/ (they 
may need a personal visit come winter :-)

If you want to hear from the US Give One Get One user base you can try 
posting something on our forum: http://en.forum.laptop.org/ and you can 
send something to OLPC News: http://www.olpcnews.com/

Its great to see developers reaching out to users in the alpha or beta 
stage of development!

My only other suggestion is to contact your target user before you start 
coding. That way you have a vetted beta community and have the best 
chance to build something you know they want.

Great looking activities! I'll see if my kids have a chance to look at 
them too.

HTHs.

Thanks,

Greg S

******************
Hello,

My student Nolan Baker and I have been developing three educational games
(COBBLE, Space Tag and Cell Management) in Sugar this summer, and we would
love to have your feedback on their alpha and beta versions.  We've posted
links to the .xo files on the main Activities page and have a wiki page for
each game.

COBBLE

COBBLE stands for COllaBorative Board game Learning Environment.  COBBLE can
be seen as a game system, where we provide the pieces, and you provide the
rules. Our goal is to make COBBLE as flexible as possible, so that users can
play any game just by interacting with the objects and chatting about the
rules in the chatbox. Currently working are the Die, which can be created
and rolled.  Cobble is in the alpha stage, more will be updated soon.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/COBBLE

Space Tag

Space Tag is a fast paced, action packed, playground thriller that's out of
this world. Immerse yourself and a few of your buddies (after all, sharing
is important) in an overhead pseudo 3D world filled with fuzzy physics.
This was educational for us to learn about incorporating mesh into a game,
and hopefully educational for students to read the code and learn about
forces in physics.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Space_Tag

Cell Management

Our first game, to learn about development with Sugar.  Aliens have abducted
6 species from Earth, and your goal is to coordinate their efforts to
escape. This game is based on regulatory networks found in RNA and DNA
transcription and translation. The full rules for Cell Management can be
found at http://www.piecepack.org/rules/CellManagement.pdf

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Cell_Management

Thanks for your comments, hope you find them fun and useful.

Mark Goadrich