Summer of Code/2007
Archives: 2006
This is a page for 2007 Summer of Code Ideas.
See last year's internship announcement for more context. If you have additional ideas for projects, or comments on the ones below, please leave a note on this talk page.
Mentoring
If you are interested in mentoring participants, please read the mentor FAQ. Note that both the ability to spend significant time mentoring, and the quality of the students are key to a good return on investment by the mentor, and the learning by the students. Please do not sign up to be a mentor unless you are certain you can meet the obligations of being a good mentor. If you are interested in mentoring, please send mail to Sj and leave a note below with a link to your userpage, where you should describe your background.
Interested mentors
Game development
- Kent Quirk
- Ben Sawyer
- Don Hopkins?
Hardware testing, display optimization, input options, alternative power and charging
- Mary Lou Jepsen
- Richard Smith
Library design and assessment
Tools for local content creation
Activities
- Erik Blankinship?
- Jean Piché
- Mauro Torres?
- John Resig?
- John Harrison?
- Mark Tyler?
- Barry Vercoe?
User stack architecture
Mesh application design
Distributed collaborative projects
System Software
- Jim Gettys?
- Chris Ball?
Projects
Input and device options
Vision input
- Mentor:Kent Quirk
Vision input similar to eyetoy concept -- looking at an image, and extracting some shape from this, low res, to use as input to a game.
New Power Inputs and Alternative Power and Energy
- Mentor:Mary Lou Jepsen or Richard Smith
- Explore alternative power inputs for the XO laptop
- Solar and human power input testing - testing our solar panels with the laptops, the human power crank, yoyo, etc.
- Gang charger and power system design for in country gang chargers off of car batteries - finding car batteries readily available in country, optimizing to our gang charger design, getting feedback from user testing in country and making modifications with gang charger supplier(s). Working closely with Firmware team on charging issues"
- Testing batteries and recharge ability for various vendors batteries
- Testing weird power inputs to motherboard and assuring safety for strange inputs
Display Readability Optimization and Testing
- Mentor: Mary Lou Jepsen
- Testing of display readability and optimization of graphical layouts to enhance display readability. Our display is very different from a standard display and has 3X the luminance resolution compared with chrominance resolution. Studies of display readability in both backlit and sunlight readable mode and the font configuration for optimized readability (with testing on children) are to be done.
Power aware applets
- Mentor:??
Nutshell: we need some applets that display information better to become better power aware.
User Stack architecture
- Many of these projects still need help
Nutshell: We're looking for several exceptional students to spend their summer in Boston, working within the user stack team, building the architecture and application suite which will be the children's primary mode of interaction with the laptop. This suite currently consists of the E-book reader, a distributed wiki notebook, and e-mail and IM clients.
ebook reader
Work with a crossmark/html book reader, or produce tools for converting to/from this format, to give children annotatable access to the worlds digitized books
wiki-notebook
Help improve features on a wikireader -- a notebook for reading, annotating, and editing collaborative texts. Features incude online/offline synchronization, distributed versioning and conflict resolution for text, and providing a variety of views and zoom levels for a given document.
IM client
nutshell: a fast instant messaging client that integrates neatly into many applications. Extensions: connect with an automatic im-translation setup; or with a network of human interpreters. See Instant messaging challenges for the complete implications of an olpc IM system.
email client
nutshell: develop a lightweight email client for children.
Content creation and review
Content stamping
Nutshell: develop a simple system for building review groups and content reviews of all types of content, and clients for viewing / downloading materials via the Open Library Exchange using these reviews to inform the view.
Distributed translation
- Mentor:Sj
Nutshell: design an online distributed translation system that matches users with language skills to parts of large localization/interpretation/translation projects.
One dictionary per child
Nutshell: Multilingual Wiktionary & Wikidata customization for the laptops/servers, with a dictionary viewer. The main task is to produce a viewer that runs efficiently on the laptops, reads standard dictionary file formats, and can display definitions in multiple languages without redundant copies of definitions.
Distributed map environment
Nutshell: define a distributed map environment for the OLPC network of XOs, school servers, and regional/global servers.
No-language tutorials
Nutshell: develop libraries for creating no-language videos, screencaps, animations, and slideshows depicting people interacting with their environment -- for demonstrations or sharing ideas across language barriers.
Game development
SDL & PyGame port
- Mentor:Kent Quirk?
Nutshell: get PyGame's api to work on the laptops, either by porting it to pygtk or by getting SDL to work smoothly on the laptop.
Details: work to implement the details (that will soon be) laid out in PyGame Implementation and/or SDL Implementation.
Easy Game Toolkit
- Mentor: Ben Sawyer
Nutshell: build a collection of Python libraries that make it as easy as possible to build certain classes of games in Python.
Details: PyGame is a good basic API for games, but its flexibility requires some detailed knowledge of game design and game architecture. In order to help novice programmers to build interesting game-like software, it would be nice to make a collection of libraries on top of PyGame that would do the following sorts of things:
- Set up the interface and make a drawing surface available
- Create simple UI structures -- collections of buttons, menus, simple textual displays
- Create animated sprites and allow them to have certain behavior -- velocity, collisions, interactions
- Managing a standard asset structure of the sorts of assets that can easily be created on the OLPC -- sounds, music, graphics.
- Basic networking system for using the OLPC mesh network
- Implement basic platformer game engine -- gravity, sidescrolling
- Implement basic 2D arcade game engine -- sprites, missiles, particle systems, sounds, input
- Implement basic 2D graphic adventure toolkit -- a world of rooms, database and data entry tools, simple command structure.
- Implement educational game toolkit -- simple text and image manipulation, sound effects, standard quiz database system, data entry tools, tracking and reporting of results
The result should be a collection of libraries that make the creation of a game like Pong a matter of a few dozen lines of code, and creating a basic platformer should be more of an art problem than a programming problem.
Accessibility
Vision and hearing tests
- proposer: Felipecarvalho
Nutshell: It would be good to include tests on bootup that can check the user's vision and hearing.
This would help identify if a child needs to be pointed to a doctor to better use the Laptop. This should be easy for a teacher or older child to administer.
Virtual Magnifying Glass
- Proposer: --Felipecarvalho 2 May 2006 (EDT)
Nutshell: Improve the magnifier so it can take advantage of X Composite Extension and be more adequate for the Laptop and much more efficient. See Virtual Magnifying Glass, &c.
Add Dynamic Mode to the software by using the X Composite Extension. This allows the user to see the current desktop contents under the magnifier window. The user can also interact with the window under the magnifier (such as mouse, scroll wheel, keyboard, etc...).
System Software
Performance is important, particularly in the UI stack. There is driver work to be done; a bit of kernel driver work, but extensive X driver work. Cairo can use further improvement. Our tinderbox can use extension to testing applications. It would be good to repeat the Packard/Gettys X Network performance tests, to see what we're doing on the wire (finding what is being done stupidly in applications, and what should be optimized). Security expert people can help on both authentication of the X protocol and its encryption. Furthermore, Eamon Walsh has done work to generalize X's security framework: we need a policy engine suitable for VServer based systems.
General system performance analysis is also welcome, focused on our core applications.
Power management and memory management are also possibilities.
2006 project ideas
see the archives for more project ideas from last year