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.

Standards

The 4th Grade Math Team is focused around creating games which will promote at least one of these math standards.
Our project has the potential to fulfill many of the standards listed, but it specifically addresses the following:
4.N.10 - Select and use appropriate operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) to solve problems, including those involving money.
4.N.11 - Know multiplication facts through 12 x 12 and related division facts. Use these facts to solve related multiplication problems and compute related problems, e.g., 3 x 5 is related to 30 x 50, 300 x 5, and 30 x 500.
4.N.12 - Add and subtract (up to five-digit numbers) and multiply (up to three digits by two digits) accurately and efficiently.
4.N.13 - Divide up to a three-digit whole number with a single-digit divisor (with or without remainders) accurately and efficiently. Interpret any remainders.

Contacts

Urko Fernandez is the one and only developer of Assimilate. Dennis contacted him via his gmail address on April 23rd, 2009 and is still awaiting a reply.

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 - Get in contact with developer of Assimilate.
• 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

• Dennis - Change the names of the tabs from "Flashcard" and "Help" to "Play" and "Edit".
• James - Add code from Measure activity to change the interface for each tab.
• Brendan - Remove the text box below the question so that you cannot change the question in the "Play" tab.
• James - Kill the play button!
• Dennis - Remove the voting function

5/8

• Brendan - When a user answers incorrectly, enter loop to prompt to display answer or guess again.
  • 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.
  • After exiting this loop, display the next flashcard.
• Dennis - Limit each flashcard to have only 1 question and 1 answer.
• James - Work on displaying the score. After seeing how the score changes, we will be able to fix it as necessary.

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.

Updates on our progress

4/24

• We found out that by default, the tabs in the top of the game only change the part above the toolbar and not the main part of the game below which we planned to modify a bit. However, we found an application called Measure which does what we want to do. There is some code which we can copy from to make changes to the main part of the screen when you change tabs. Go to the source code for Measure and open the toolbar_top.py. The function we are interested in is called "def _toolbar_changed_cb(self, tbox, num)".
• Brendan wasn't able to meet with us this week to update us on setting up the development environment (Eclipse, Pydev, Git). Yesterday Brendan said that he has been working on this but hasn't used it with Assimilate yet. Dennis will check with him to see how it's going after today.
• Dennis contacted the developer of Assimilate, but hasn't heard back yet.
• James figured out that it is best not to edit the "Activities" tab. Instead we will use the "Flashcard" and "Help" tabs and change their names to "Play" and "Edit".
• Everyone decided who will work on exactly which parts of the project for the next few weeks.

Our Plan

"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

• Tips & Tricks
• Eclipse download
• Installing Pydev plugin: In Eclipse, go to Help > Software Updates... > Available Software > Add Site..., add http://pydev.sourceforge.net/updates/ and install