RPI

A team of undergraduates at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been commissioned to develop an activity to teach children basic math skills. We will be using this page to organize our progress and provide status.

The project is organized into two phases: first, build a simple end-to-end tic-tac-toe activity to become familiar with developing an activity from the ground up (see below). Second, to design and implement the math activity, utilizing what we've learned from the tic-tac-toe experience.

The Team

• Frank Tobia (tobiaf2@rpi.edu)
• Ryan Leary (learyr@rpi.edu)
• Ben Classen (classb@rpi.edu)
• Allen Lavoie (lavoia@rpi.edu)
• David Pizzuto (pizzud@rpi.edu)

Math activity

• The proposal
• Frank's design ideas

Milestones

• XML Formats

Week 0

• All XML formats designed
  • Problem format (Ryan)
  • Goal format
  • Persistence of state format
  • Resource & Market format (Frank)
• Proof of concept implementations for parsing all XML formats
• Think about graphics for goals, resources, etc.

Week 1

• XML formats are integrated
• XML parsers are written (in Python with xml.dom)
• Python representations are started upon

Week 2

• Simple text- or stick-figure-based game
• Basic (very very basic) end-to-end game system completed

Week 3

• Add graphics
• Add sound
• Make game more interesting

Week 4 (May 1st)

• Testing
• clean up
• fixing
• dealing with problems that have arisen

Subsystems

• Graphics module
• Sound module
• Question module
• Engine module

Requirements

• Multiplayer
• Collaborative

Useful Links

Hosting: http://code.google.com/p/rpi-olpc/

SVN book / tutorial: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

Sugar pyDoc: http://www.vrplumber.com/sugar-docs/sugar.html

Activity Tutorial (useful for an idea of how Sugar likes to run things, as well as directory structure): http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Activity_Tutorial

pyGTK Activity Tutorial (has a nice code structure): http://wiki.laptop.org/go/PyGTK/Hello_World_Tutorial

Eclipse IDE: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

Subclipse SVN plugin for Eclipse: http://subclipse.tigris.org/install.html

Pydev Python plugin for Eclipse: http://pydev.sourceforge.net/download.html