[OLPC-GSoC] SoC activity development

[Wade Brainerd]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 12:37 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:

> We could use more mentors specifically for projects integrating with
> sugar, networking and other core services -- many students have been
> applying to create their own standalone code or activities from scratch, but
> that does not give them much of a chance to learn about collaborating on a
> larger project.


What about treating several of the proposed activities as a one large
project?  We would create a SoC "activity team" of 4-8 students and 2-3
mentors, and then have these students develop several of the activity ideas
over the summer.

Developing activities involves so much similar code that I think it would be
wasteful for individuals to have to learn everything separately.  And there
is an opportunity for students to learn about working as part of a team in
different roles.

For example if we were to tackle a subset of these activities:

Typing Tutor
Flash Cards
Finance
Connect*
Mastermind*
Deducto*
Chess*
Checkers*
Othello*
Mancala*
Classroom Tools

*These are so similar that they could be developed by one team in parallel.

We would assign the members of our team one or more of the following roles:

Interface coder - Responsible for the activity user interface.  Includes
PyGTK toolbars, custom widgets and event handling.

Model coder - Responsible for the activity state machine and logic.
Includes implementing application states & transitions between them, data
processing algorithms, serialization (journal interaction).

Collaboration coder - Responsible for activity sharing and collaboration.
Includes protocol design & implementation, DBUS & tubes programming.

This project would require the following supprt from the OLPC organization:

Mentors - At least 2 programming mentors (myself, manu, tomeu, morgs, cjb,
anyone else?) and one organization mentor (mel, sj?).  The programmers would
divide responsibility for the different parts of each activity, and develop
as many as possible to a polished state over the course of the summer.

Support Artist - A volunteer artist with a lot of spare time to develop
toolbar and activity icons as well as bitmapped graphics for game pieces.

This is kind of a prototype of my Activity Development Portal proposal at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Activities.

Anyone interested?

Regards,

Wade



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For example, students could be divided between collaboration, UI design and
implementation,
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