[OLPC-Games] [sugar] Physics -- Newtonian mechanics.. for kids!

[Brian Jordan]

Hey Yoshiki,

Currently, you can pause using the spacebar. We haven't gotten to
making our own more appropriate SVG icons for the menu (they were all
taken from other applications), but Pause will definitely be added as
a visual menu item (and I think there is an icon in . I'd also like to
add speed or frame advance controls.

Scripting is a great idea. I am writing what I can of this project
using Elements, a python simplification wrapper API for pyBox2D --
hopefully this should give us a simple scripting starting point. Once
we get an XML format and Physical object selecting/editing
capabilities, some way of letting kids mess with the python or XML
fields from within the activity would be great.

The next steps, though, are to (1) have dropdown menus for each tool
much like Paint's. This should really crack open the functionality
that Box2D supports and allow for serious inventing/testing of
mechanical processes with this activity. And, of course, (2) is to
integrate Physics with an XML physics scene format.

#olpc-physics on irc.freenode.net to help with either of these!

Cheers,
Brian

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Yoshiki Ohshima <yoshiki at vpri.org> wrote:
> At Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:14:05 -0400,
> Brian Jordan wrote:
>>
>> Hi friends!
>>
>> Physics is a physics playground for the XO currently being written by
>> myself and Alex Levenson. We hope it will be a fun tool for playing
>> with and learning physical concepts, and that the work of the
>> Physics/Elements teams can be used as a backend for making all
>> activities fun and interactive.
>
>  It is working pretty well.  One thing I'm for sure you're planning
> to add is a switch to stop and resume time.  My colleague Takashi, who
> did a similar stuff but a scriptable one
> (http://languagegame.org:8080/ggame/15), and I were having fun to make
> a pendulum in "Physics" with pre-planned scaffoldings and removing
> them.  (It can be a fun puzzle, actually.)
>
>  Yes, for longer term, it would be great if there is a scripting
> capability so that the user can specify, say, when an object goes to
> certain location, that can trigger a script and, say, create a new
> object.
>
> -- Yoshiki
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