Creating an activity

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This page is intended to outline, and to provide links for, all the steps in creating an Activity. From initial concept to release and support.

Ideas

The first step in creating an activity is coming up with a good idea. OLPC is not just another fancy hardware platform for kids to use - it is also a rethinking about how to use a computer as an educational tool. To that end, there are several design principles that you should keep in mind as you think about your activity. In particular, activities should include:

• discoverability - Is the activity intuitive to learn to use? Generally speaking, large instruction manuals are boring to read, and hard to translate. The more intuitive you can make the interface to your activity the better. That means suggestive images on buttons rather than text, etc.
• extensibility - Can the activity be easily edited by teachers and kids to expand its use? For example, does your quiz activity give teachers the ability to change the questions so that they can use it for any type of quiz question, not just the ones you thought of?
• collaboration - Can your activity be used by more than one child at a time? Great activities should have a single-user mode, and a multi-user mode that makes sense with the activity. Is your game multiplayer, is your word processor able to let two people write the same document?
• More ...

Many of these ideas are core to the Sugar interface for the XO, and it is worth taking a look at the human intereface guidlines and educational activity guidlines for more detailed information.

Also have a look at other software ideas, and existing activities (link) to find out what is already going on. Maybe you can join an existing team and help out. There are many facets to a team including artists (link) and programmers (link) - you don't need to know everything about making an activity to be a part of the process.

Design

While, the Educational activity guidelines and OLPC Human Interface Guidelines are the foundation of your activity, there are some important things to keep in mind about the OLPC hardware platform when you think about designing the implementation of your activity.

overview of this unique hardware environment

• Display

Development

• Getting started programming
• There are various tutorials. We should make sure they all are linked in Getting_started_programming.

Then once you have some code written:

• Importing your project

what else?

Release process

what else?

l10n

There isn't currently a l10n page targetted at developers. See:

• Python i18n
• Activity Translations
• Localization
• Resource links in Translating.
• Kuku/Localization Resource links at the bottom of Kuku.

wiki page

Create a wiki page, and add it to Activities. See examples in Activities. This step should not be taken before you have working code.

testing and review

The Activity review and testing process is still being developed. Ask on #olpc-content.

See Content release cycle.

The testing process is still being developed. See:

• Category:Test Plans
• Test meeting Minutes

what else?