User:Prakhar/Weekly Updates

TYPING TURTLE

This page summarizes various activities that have been a part of the development process of game based typing turtle activity.

May 1-May 7, 2008

• Introduction period with my mentor Mr. Wade Brainerd and co-developer Ms. Kate Scheppke
• Laid out plans with my mentor. Kate will work on basic typing activity and I'll work on game-based typing activity.
• Studied various current typing games like TuxType.
• Wade conducted a survey to examine our present technical background.
• Wade prepared a short tutorial for us to refer to equip ourselves with required technical skills.

May 8-May 19, 2008

• Went into university exams. No progress.

May 20-May 27, 2008

• Started reading about Sugar HIG and Sugar Activity Tutorial
• Switched from Ubuntu to Fedora.
• Emulated the Sugar environment on my PCs.

May 28-June 4, 2008

• Started working on the game designs.
• First mock-ups released.
• Received my XO-1 on June 3
• Dedicated 2 days to explore the XO environment.

June 5-June 11, 2008

• Attended a Python workshop on June 7, 2008 at IPEC College, Ghaziabad [1] jointly organised by CSI and ILUG-D. This event really set the tone for the project.
• Almost final mock-ups released. Still scope for improvement.
• Converting the mock-ups into Python classes and methods.
• Documented all the work on wiki.

June 12-June 19, 2008

• Started working on Python and PyGTK by referring to respective tutorials.
• Working on art work required in the activity interface.(like turtle, bubbles etc.) mock-ups will be uploaded soon.
• Browsed the source code of existing activities in XO. I was unable to comprehend the code due to lack of python experience

June 20-July 2, 2008

• Learnt Python from byteofpython.org and the official tutorial from python.org
• Studied PyGTK tutorial from pygtk.org and completed all the related exercises
• Studied JSON from json.org
• This period involved learning all the technologies related to the project so that I can start coding.

July 3-July 10, 2008

• Again browsed the source code of existing activities in XO. I could easily understand each and everything.
• Studied the Activity Tutorial again and also the latest Sugar Handbook from OLPC Austria.
• Successfully completed my first activity- "HelloWorld" as per the guidelines in above mentioned two tutorials :)
• Finally started my project- TypingTurtle.activity. A great relief for me :) But it was just the beginning of a roller coaster ride ahead

July 11-July 18, 2008

• First "Welcome" screen developed:
  • gtk.VBox() and gtk.HBox() as containers
  • gtk.Button(), gtk.Image(), gtk.Label() as main child widgets
• Struggled a lot with multiple-screen interface implementation. To explain a little:

 Screen 1->Click button->goto Screen 2->Click button->goto back to Screen 1.

• I was unsuccessful to implement this, despite consulting with many people including tomeu, eben, cjl and many more in #pygtk channel. The whole week went searching for a possible way to do it but could not find it.(I'm sure there is a way that I'm missing)
• During my quest to satiate my hunger for above implementation, I stumbled upon an interesting finding: most of the activities in XO are single-screen based; everything happens within a single canvas, there's no shifting of canvas etc..

July 19-July 27, 2008

• After a hard week, I pondered over the weekend and finally dumped my idea of multi-screen UI to settle for gtk.Notebook() as my main canvas with following functionality:

 Screen-1(tab1)->Click button->goto Screen 2(tab2) and vice versa.

• This provided an instant acceleration to my project, although on the expense of my earlier UI.
• Started designing the exercises now: Alphabets, Words and so on.
• Welcome screen was looking to plain and simple from kid's perspective. Did a major overhaul of the whole GUI so that it looks more kiddish.
• Added a tutorial(HowTo) tab for the activity.
• Completed inter-navigation between all the screens.
• XO's resolution is 1200*800, I got to know this now!!

July 28-August 5, 2008

• Created .exer files(Exercise files like alphabets.exer)
• Working on randomly reading content from exercises' file
• Figured a way out of how to unset focus flags from score, timer(gtk.Entry). A little code snippet:

   score = gtk.Entry()
   score.unset_flags(gtk.CAN_FOCUS)

August 6-7-8-9, 2008

• Presented my research paper in an international conference[2]
• No development progress
• Sample Tutorial added

August 10-August 14, 2008

• Mapping of exercises with the GUI.
• Applied for OLPC Git Project Hosting. Set-up local git repository on my PC.
• Started Working on documentation

Major Highlights

• I can't forget my search for multi-screen GUI.period.
• Past couple of weeks(July 15 onwards) saw most of the development progress
• Python is the coolest thing in programming!
• Learnt to use PyGTK references at every second :)