User talk:Salil

What is this?
While interacting with teachers involved with OLPC projects in Goa (see the blog that we maintain for our work) and based on their inputs and my own thoughts, I am putting together a 'wish list' of activties we would like to have in Sugar. Some of these are localisation of existing Sugar Activities, while others are altogether new activities that I think would be useful to teachers in the Indian primary school scenario.

So here is the list - there will obviously be additions and changes to the list as we go along, and you are invited to contribute to this, especially if you are working in (or are familiar with) the Indian schooling environment.

'Letters' activity in Devnagri
Letters is an existing Sugar activity, which works with Roman letters for the English language. It would be very useful to have this activity with Devnagri letters, with words searched against a Hindi dictionary (and possibly Marathi and Konkani as well since they also use the Devnagri script – option to switch language could be provided in the activity via buttons in the toolbar). The Devnagri vowels ('matras') could be either provided as part of the random letters generated (just like the English vowels are part of the letters generated when playing the game in English)

OR

The vowels ('matras') could always be present in a row under the letters generated (which would only be consonants). From this row, the player could pick up the matras to attach to the consonants while making the words – one matra could be picked up multiple times for the same word (e.g. the ि matra for a word like बिटिया).

Picture Crossword
Does not exist yet. This would be a crossword game, where the clues are given by way of images. The activity should allow for creating custom games – much like Memorize, perhaps with a similar interface for creating the word-to-clue pair, the crossword grid will have to be manually defined – which words to be placed where and which boxes in the grid to be blacked out. The answers will have to be typed in by the user in the crossword grid by clicking on the starting box in the grid and using the arrow keys to move up/down or right.

The game could be extended to behave like a standard crossword as well, with the clues entirely in text (not images) though this can be dropped if it increases the complexity level of the game.

The game should have support for the Devnagri script. Since the games will be created by the user, it can be either be assumed that the words are valid words from the language selected (risky, game creators can make mistakes!) or a dictionary check could be done for that language to validate the word (better option).

Learning the Clock
There is a GCompris activity called Clockgame that is more or less what is required, but it could do with a more standard Sugar-like interface and graphics (like in the Clock activity). This requirement came from the teachers at Nirmala KG Resource Room, who work with children with special needs. The activity would have a clock dial with the three hands, which can all be moved by the user by dragging them. In the GCompris game, the small hour hand moves as the minute hand is moved, and perhaps this could be retained. A random time is generated (such as 09:35); the user then has to move the hands of the clock to match the time. In GCompris Clockgame, there are different levels of complexity - in initial levels the seconds hand is not present at all and the time generated is simple (o' clock or 15 mins, 30 mins and 45 mins). In higher levels, the seconds hand comes into the picture and the time also gets more and more complex. It would be nice to retain the varying levels of complexity, perhaps even keep a score to make it more exciting.

What has already been done.
A few of the requirements have already been met, which are documented below:

Memorize without having to memorize!
Memorize is an existing Sugar activity - a memory game that requires the player to find matching pairs in a grid of tiles that are face down, so that besides knowing the matching tiles, the player is also required to remember the location of the tiles in case the match did not happen when the tiles were uncovered. For very small children, even the task of determining a matching pair can be difficult, so we need an identical game that can be played with tiles face up (not hidden). If you've schooled in India, this is similar to a 'Match the Following' kind of exercise that primary school children do.

The Memorize activity was cloned to another activity named 'TileMatch' that does as described above. This hasn't been released to the public on ASLO yet (some cosmetic cleaning up needs to be done) but you can preview it by downloading the .xo file and loading it into Sugar.

Reflection with multiple colours
Reflection is an existing Sugar activity that is about achieving reflective symmetry. It uses four colours - black, white and the two colours from the learner's Sugar palette. While demostrating this to primary school teachers in a Teacher Trainng Program, the teachers felt that it might be even more exciting for the children if they had more colours to play around with, so that they could also make an attactive and colourful pattern while striving for symmetry. I mentioned this to Walter Bender, who has authored the original activity, and in a few days we had the new version of Refection with the changes as desired. Note that an even more recent version may be available on ASLO (follow the link at the beginning of the paragraph).