Olin university chapter/Software/Meeting Notes

OLPC software! Here is super draft version of everything so that I can get back to work. I will pretty-fy this page later.

Meeting notes:

Oct 8, 2008

RPG ideation and playing around with testing XOs!

Summary of ideation: the RPG will be based on Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. You have been challenged to travel the whole world in 80 days. Can you do it? To do so, you must complete several challenges to pass oceans and channels. You must visit 7 continents and participate in some activities in the continents. After visiting each continent, you will receive a postcard. Once you have accumulated all the postcards, you may return to your home continent and show off your prize.

Work distribution: Each person has chosen a continent and will be responsible to designing the activities for that continent. People can also choose to take the challenge activities that allow for travel between continents - none of those have been claimed yet.

More information can be found at AroundTheWorld

Oct 1, 2008

Ideation day! We (Arash, Zack Brass, Colin Zwiebel, Elsa Culler and I) went through all the ideas we had, and here they are:

Educational RPG Description: A large scale english-learning RPG game written by all of us in an effort to learn Python People interested: Yifan, Colin, Elsa, Zach Brass

Simulink Lite for the OLPC Description: A lightweight simulink - like program that could be used to make flow diagrams, circuit diagrams, all sorts of nifty things. It's just lines and boxes, right? People interested: None

English learning Description: A flikr - like program that links users to all kinds of useful existing English apps. If this works out well for the OLPC, ultimately it coudl be taken to the web. People interested: Elsa Culler, Colin Zwiebel

IRC bots Description: a useful program to help with trac and that sort of stuff. Consult Stevo for bots. People interested: none

App testing Description: testing apps! People interested: Colin Zwiebel, Zachary Brass

Yalp Description: A music-mixing program People interested: Ben Fisher

Text Twist: Description: Just like the Yahoo game, but for the xo People interested: Arash Ushani

Musical notation (aka Finale or Sibelius) Description: a notation program for music People interested: None

Incredible Machine Description: A Rube Goldberg simulation game Peole interested: Colin Zwiebel

Crayon Physics Description: A physics simulation game, very much like the existing game People interested: Yifan Sun

Chatbot Description: A chatbot, like Eliza People interested: Zachary Brass

Sept 24 2008

Sigh, not many people showed up today, just Tank, Arash, Xy, and me. But we had a good time... we got real xo's today and fiddled around with them a bit. There seems to be a lot of putzing going around, so we went around and talked about projects we forsee ourselves doing this semester, and I have come up with a table of every software-related idea that I believe has come up. Please add to the list!

Project idea People interested Typing / text twist thingy Arash English training for international teachers Elsa Yalp - a music building software Ben?? website with tracking Ilari??

I personally have made a semester goal of looking at all the projects people have developed but have never gone everywhere, to get a sense of what's out there. That way we can see where things are lacking. I will also definitely get hte git repository working by next week's meeting, and send out info about that... so far, it seems pretty self explanatory, but you do need to run it on linux, not windows or cygwin.

Sept 16 2008

Everyone got the emulator working on windows. Yay! The emulator can also be run on other platforms, or you can use jhbuild or something to actually install it, but no one tried that this time.

It seems that python knowledge is mixed, but everyone at this meeting had programming experience, so we directed people to Allen Downey's book: http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.pdf

Arash, Mikey, and I got a couple programs working as Activities, so we know how to do it, but they're very simple programs without sound, and we had a lot of problems along the way. This prompted us to make the following list of things to pursue:

- sound, on the emulator and on the xo. How to.
- size of program, how small should we aim for? Larry ran fine, but the high-speed shooting game I made over the summer flopped.
- How do we go between our computer and qemu? wiki.laptop says you can use a USB and journal... I haven't gotten it working and Mikey and I used wget and our personal webspaces
- Keyboard layout/mouse speed/general Xserver settings for more comfort in emulating
- network access
- setting up a git repository

For anyone who wanted to come to the meeting but couldn't make it, ask Arash for his big stick and he'll give you the zip file with the emulation stuff. It is also available online, and it takes forever to download. The goal is to

1) learn python / pygame a little bit if you don't already know it, and plan to make games. If you know python but not pygame, google for chimp.py, and you should get a nice tutorial 2) make compatible programs. Any program will do.