Math4Team/RIT/Projects

Colour The Part

Incorporating math and color theory onto a platformer, create a fun and educational activity targeted at 4th grade Math students. The activity uses elements of platform games with obstacles and puzzle solving to teach addition and multiplication of fractions while keeping the player entertained.

M.P.G.

M.P.G. is an RIT Math4Team game. This is a Dungeons and Dragons adventure style game where players will have to solve various math puzzles to defeat enemies and proceed through the dungeons.

Math Maze

Kevin Hockey and Tom Sekovski are making maze style game (built upon the pre-existing game [Maze]) where at each decision moment the player has to answer a question. Some questions include: adding/subtracting numbers, factoring, word and fraction problems

schoolserver.rit.edu

The XO school Server, or XS, is one of the products of the OLPC project, designed to complement the XO laptop. It is a Linux-based OS (a Fedora-based distribution) engineered to be installed on generic low-end servers. When we deploy one laptop per child, we must also provide additional infrastructure extending the capabilities of the laptops. While the laptops are self-sufficient for many learning activities, other activities and services depend on the School Server providing connectivity, shared resources and services. Services, tools and activities running on the School Server allow asynchronous interaction, can use larger storage capacity, and take advantage of the processing power of the XS.

Teacher's Tools

Alex Jones is planning on creating a tool for teachers to help evaluate how well their students have learned certain material. It will be similar to Assimilate but help the teachers learn the weak points of their students' knowledge.

Flash Card Game - Assimilate

This project is one of many small projects focused on developing 4th grade math games which will run on the OLPC XO. We are RIT students who are working on this with the help of other developers who become interested in our projects. The focus of this project is to turn an existing game (Assimilate) into a math based flash card game which will hopefully be included on future XO's.

Group members: Dennis Jalbert, James Kolb, Brendan Reen

Fun Towers

Fun Towers is a pre-existing game that can be found online in several version (http://www.funnytowers.com/ is one example) that has been ported to the XO, written in Squeak. Our team is modifying this purely numerical/card based game into one that can be used as a teaching tool as part of the 4th grade math project. Our initial goals in modifying the pre-existing game remain relatively simple and achievable, and our goal is to produce verifiable results that can be used to point to the very preliminary success of the math4 program, while more in-depth projects are still in development. The game itself is simple, users are given a card and with it are able to remove from one of 3 pyramids of cards a card that is one greater or one lower in value. This card that has been removed is the users new card, and any cards that were covered by the removed card are now in play.

Group members are Eric Mallon, Tyler Bragdon, Chris Daniels

Lemonade Stand

Lemonade stand (or more likely, *Insert produce here* stand) is a collaboration project at RIT. It is designed to test children on fractions, working with money, estimation, and other math topics. While our time restraints limit the extent to which we can implement features, the current goal is a feature complete program even if lacking in graphics. We plan on having a system based on buying and selling commodities and an eventual season based economy.

The largest and most complex task of the project will be the introduction of a basic AI to handle the economy, the use of graphics, and localization. We are planning on introducing the game with a generic currency model while trying to find a commodity that either works worldwide, or is easy to replace for regional types. At the very least, we plan on having a feature complete text model that can be finished by other interested parties.

The RIT students currently working on the project are Anthony King, Nathaniel Case, Jonathan Sanger, Mitchell DeMarco, Steven Schoenfeld, and Anthony Lubriani.

Muthris

Muthris is a math themed, Tetris-based game inspired by Cuyo. Players control falling blocks which must be grouped in certain math related ways in-order to clear that grouping from the board. The level is lost when the board fills up with blocks. Players learn math skills by fun repetition of simple mathematical problems and the grouping of sets of numbers. Levels are abstracted away from the core game. This allows one to simple drop in new levels and learn different mathematical concepts.

Group Members: Doug

Produce Puzzle

The object of the game is to solve a system of equations with unknowns represented by fruits. The player is given the column sums and row sums, and from there he must determine the value of each fruit. The game difficulty can be changed, and it ranges from solving 3x3 fruit equations, all the way up to 9x9 fruit grids.

We, Abbi Honeycutt and Kennedy Kong from Rochester Institute of Technology, has taken over this project. Previous creators were Matthew Michihara, Elizabeth Deng, and Aaron Macris from University of Southern California during their "Code for a cause OLPC Hack-a-thon".

Question Support API

The purpose of the Question Support API is to provide a unified method for Activities to access standardized format question files. The API currently supports the use of multiple choice questions with a single correct answer and no partial credit. Currently, the API only reports questions in a plain text format from Moodle format question files.

Group members are Greg Stevens, Jameson Finney, Brian Long

Teacher Reporting

We, Wesley Dillingham, and Jeremiah Green hope to utilize modified Moodle modules and a customized XS School Server operating system. Our goal is to allow results and / or grades, from student activities to be readily available to teachers. Based on their wants and needs, the teachers can then generate custom reports on a class or student and have the ability to determine what types of problems students are finding most difficult. Additionally we would like to implement logic in the module which analyzes student activity and checks for a strict yes or no interpretation of whether or not each student understands various curriculum standards. In the end we imagine the XS environment running on an XO itself, allowing the teachers the same portability as the students.