Flash Card Game - Assimilate

Description

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
• Brendan Reen
• James Kolb

Goals

Modify Assimilate in the following ways:

• Fix the "tabs" so that there are 2 interfaces.
  • Create - Add questions & answers as well as categorize the cards (geometry, algebra, etc)
  • View - Show the question and input an answer. The game already removes points if you take over 10 seconds to guess, so we would like to add a count down timer to the side showing how many seconds remain.
• Display the correct answer or allow for another guess (worth less points for each guess) after providing an incorrect answer.
  • Note: Currently the game doesn't give you the correct answer. It lets you know what everyone else guessed and you get to vote for which answer you believe to be correct. We would like to change this so that it always lets you know the correct answer. However, we can still keep the entire class results to possibly give to the teacher using another groups project (Teacher Reporting/API).
• Add multiple types of flash cards beside basic addition/subtraction/multiplication/division.
  • We will need to work with the API group to store our questions, especially the pictures which will bee needed for geometry questions.
• Allow more than 2 people to connect to a game (we were unable to get a 3rd person to join in the activity).

Week by week milestones

• 4/24
  • Brendan - Setup development environment (Eclipse, Pydev, Git)
  • Dennis contacted the developer of Assimilate, but hasn't heard back yet.
  • James - Figure out how to edit the "Activities" tab since it isn't listed in the toolbars.py file
  • Everyone - Decide who will work on exactly which parts of the project for the next few weeks.
• 5/1
  • Brendan - Remove the text box below the question so that you cannot change the question.
  • Edit the Display box from the Answer section so that it lets you know if you got the answer correct or not (for now we will just display the correct answer if the answer was wrong).
• 5/8
  • When a user answers incorrectly, enter loop to prompt to display answer or guess again.
    • Brendan - If user chooses to display the answer, remove a point from their score, display the correct answer, and exit the loop.
    • If user chooses to guess again, clear the input field and make the question worth half the points. Only loop through this 2x so that the maximum number of guesses is 3.
  • Change the Edit tab so that each answer corresponds to the correct question.
• 5/15
  • Have the game give the correct answer after the 3rd incorrect attempt or after guessing correctly. Allow questions/answers to be entered in the Create tab and allow the game to run properly in the View/Activity tab.
  • Fix any problems that have come up during this time which we hadn't planned on before.

"Must haves"

• Fix the "tabs"
• Show the correct answer!

"Should haves"

• Categorize the cards by type of math problem
• Alternate types of math besides basic arithmetic

"Would be nice to have"

• More than 2 people playing
• Seconds remaining timer
• Send report to teacher about student responses

Links & Resources

• Math 4 RIT Homepage

Assimilate

• Assimilate Homepage
• Download Assimilate
• Repository

Python/Sugar

• Toolbox code
• Example code for a toolbar listener

Helpful stuff

• Directory of files on the XO: /home/olpc/Activities/Assimilate.activity
• Eclipse download
• Installing Pydev plugin: In Eclipse, go to Help > Software Updates... > Available Software > Add Site..., add http://pydev.sourceforge.net/updates/ and install