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)

Thoughts for Math Activity

• Frank's thoughts after collaboration with a friend from Game Dev club
• Treasure MathStorm type gameplay
• Goal Based Game
  • Build a town/village?
  • Obtain resources by completing math
• Several levels with increasing difficulty
• Multiplayer?
  • Neighboring towns
  • Competition in development
  • CAPITALISM!

Realistic Goals/Milestones

• Basic RPG
• Obtain resources with math (mini-games)
• Basic idea of creating houses
• Go from building houses to neighborhoods, cities, etc etc (scoring)

Milestones (for TicTacToe)

Week 0

• URP forms in - Done

Week 1

• sugarized TTT program - Done
  • local only - no multiplayer needed
• git hosting
  • Using Google Code as a temporary host
• wiki pages - Done

Week 2

• mesh multiplayer - Incomplete
• integrate XO colors - Done
• basic translations - Done
• pootle use - Done

week 3 (provisional)

• csound (using gstreamer instead) - Done
• images (tiles from kuku/memorize) - Done

post break

• Generate ideas for Math Activity
• Written game concepts/mockups
• Formal site for the math activity

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