Re: [IAEP] New activity: Arithmetic.
On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi Caroline, Hi Chris, I had a crazy idea for Arithmetic yesterday. Its a wonderful game for the GPA. Its exactly the kind of practice the students at GPA need. Its collaborative and other people are a huge key to engagement. But as you said it needs a little something more to make it fun. This sounds like a good way to make it more fun, although I suppose it's making the game longer by making the players wait for someone to place a piece in the Physics world before getting a new question; another way would be to replace the numeric scores with icons that race towards a finish line as their owners score points, perhaps. My thinking was that you have to use your time (is is 10 seconds per question?) to both answer the question and do your physics move. Maybe physics moves accumulate for a minute or two but you never wait for a physics move. This is a high pressure timed adreline rush game. The goal is to get students to know their facts so well that they can answer math questions while thinking about the physics game not the math. We want to drill the recall so, for example, when they do algebra and such it takes very few neurons firing to do the arithmetic so they can focus their thinking on the algebra. I also think perhaps this game would not get boring, because you are not thinking about the math facts, you are thinking about what you want to create with Physics and thats interesting even the hundreth time. I feel like a lot of the flash animation games are interesting for a while, but once you;ve seen all the cool animations a few times its boring again. I also would love to not see an emphasis on points or winners or losers. Better performance gives you more physics moves so there is incentive, but its not directly competitive. Unfortunately, I don't have any talent for the UI stuff -- the hope was that by getting the collaboration part of the activity out there, someone with UI skills will adopt making a fun UI for it (and better scoring, and better question generation logic, etc). :) We need a way to store project ideas and allow developers and teachers to collaborate around them. Thanks, - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org One Laptop Per Child -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] New activity: Arithmetic.
Hi Chris, I had a crazy idea for Arithmetic yesterday. Its a wonderful game for the GPA. Its exactly the kind of practice the students at GPA need. Its collaborative and other people are a huge key to engagement. But as you said it needs a little something more to make it fun. This may not be technically easy but here is my idea. Combine it with Physics. Everytime you get an answer right you earn a move in Physics. You get to put down a block or make a new shape or grab. Super cool would be collaborative where everyone is working in the same world either trying to build something together or just knocking each other stuff around. Scoring: with this we no longer need explicit scoring. I think scoring can be discouraging if you are always the worst one in your class or you just have brain that is slow to retrieve math facts. However, I think your moves should expire, so if you are fast you have an advantage, you have more time to think about and make your physics moves. I think the goal is to encourage the students to speed up their retrieval, but still have it be fun no matter where you are right now. Doing well and playing fast gives you advantages that are fun, but doesn't set up a strict, I win, you lose dynamic. Is a shared physics world among all the contestants possible? It might be as good or better for some personality types if everyone had their own world. Especially if you could see a picture of the other people's worlds. A feature request is to save at least a picture of the world you create to the Journal so we can use it in a Portfolio. I created this roller coaster by knowing my multiplication facts on hard On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi, Over the last few Sunday afternoons, Ben Schwartz, Michael Stone and I have been hacking on a new activity. It's a collaborative arithmetic quiz, and extensively uses Ben's groupthink collaboration module. Here's a link to a bundle: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/downloads/latest/4204/addon-4204-latest.xo http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4204 The game tries to show all the participants the same questions at the same time, gives an ongoing scoreboard of how many questions each participant has answered correctly, and measures the amount of time it takes everyone to answer each question. It also lets the group choose which of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division their game should use, and how hard the questions should be. We think it's pretty fun already, but it still needs plenty of work, and we'd love to have help with it. Some obvious next steps are: * Artwork! We haven't spent any time making it pretty. If someone wants to go ahead and rip everything apart and put it back together in a way that actually looks attractive, that would be awesome. * Looks like I messed up the logo in Inkscape, and it doesn't have the correct stroke_color references. * It crashes when resumed, as opposed to launched with Start. Haven't looked into that yet. * Gettextification and translations. * An algorithm for scoring that depends on how quickly an answer is given. (One idea could be that you get 9 points if you answer with 9 seconds left, down to 1 point for answering with 1 second left.) * A natural end to each round, perhaps involving giving out medals (just as Typing Turtle does) for achievement to the participants. * There may still be cases where it shows entirely different questions to the participants, instead of everyone seeing the same ones, and we'd like to know about that so we can fix it. If anyone's in a position to get feedback from kids on whether playing this collaboratively is fun, and what might make it more fun, that'd be really good to hear. We'd welcome everyone's changes to the activity; we can always back out a change if it needs to be discussed more, so don't be shy about pushing changes to a branch or asking for direct commit access. (If there's some way to allow anyone with an SL gitorious account to commit directly, that would be an ideal setup.) The GIT tree contains groupthink referenced as a submodule, so to check it out: git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/arithmetic/mainline.gitArithmetic.activity cd Arithmetic.activity git submodule init git submodule update Thanks! - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] New activity: Arithmetic.
Hi Caroline, Hi Chris, I had a crazy idea for Arithmetic yesterday. Its a wonderful game for the GPA. Its exactly the kind of practice the students at GPA need. Its collaborative and other people are a huge key to engagement. But as you said it needs a little something more to make it fun. This sounds like a good way to make it more fun, although I suppose it's making the game longer by making the players wait for someone to place a piece in the Physics world before getting a new question; another way would be to replace the numeric scores with icons that race towards a finish line as their owners score points, perhaps. Unfortunately, I don't have any talent for the UI stuff -- the hope was that by getting the collaboration part of the activity out there, someone with UI skills will adopt making a fun UI for it (and better scoring, and better question generation logic, etc). :) Thanks, - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org One Laptop Per Child ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] New activity: Arithmetic.
First of all, it's wonderful to finally see this activity. Plenty of words in the UI are not easy, starting with difficulty. :-) There doesn't seem to be any scratch space to work in, but I'm just looking at the screen shot. Can the user lay out a long division in the standard form? Can the user have some place to write out extra numbers for borrow/carry (optionally tiny) and possibly cross out the original numbers? There are at least two styles for this, with tiny numbers probably the norm when doing multi-digit multiplication. The 3 difficulty levels are kind of vague. Just for addition I can think of... 0..9 plus 0..9 resulting in 0..9 0..9 plus 0..9 resulting in 0..18 0..9 plus 0..9 plus optional-one resulting in 0..19 multi-digit w/o carry multi-digit w/ carry, no change in number of digits arbitrary multi-digit That's w/o even considering decimals, negative numbers, fractions, and worse. Subtraction has an extra level, because borrowing is harder when you need to borrow from a zero. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] New activity: Arithmetic.
Hi, Over the last few Sunday afternoons, Ben Schwartz, Michael Stone and I have been hacking on a new activity. It's a collaborative arithmetic quiz, and extensively uses Ben's groupthink collaboration module. Here's a link to a bundle: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/downloads/latest/4204/addon-4204-latest.xo http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4204 The game tries to show all the participants the same questions at the same time, gives an ongoing scoreboard of how many questions each participant has answered correctly, and measures the amount of time it takes everyone to answer each question. It also lets the group choose which of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division their game should use, and how hard the questions should be. We think it's pretty fun already, but it still needs plenty of work, and we'd love to have help with it. Some obvious next steps are: * Artwork! We haven't spent any time making it pretty. If someone wants to go ahead and rip everything apart and put it back together in a way that actually looks attractive, that would be awesome. * Looks like I messed up the logo in Inkscape, and it doesn't have the correct stroke_color references. * It crashes when resumed, as opposed to launched with Start. Haven't looked into that yet. * Gettextification and translations. * An algorithm for scoring that depends on how quickly an answer is given. (One idea could be that you get 9 points if you answer with 9 seconds left, down to 1 point for answering with 1 second left.) * A natural end to each round, perhaps involving giving out medals (just as Typing Turtle does) for achievement to the participants. * There may still be cases where it shows entirely different questions to the participants, instead of everyone seeing the same ones, and we'd like to know about that so we can fix it. If anyone's in a position to get feedback from kids on whether playing this collaboratively is fun, and what might make it more fun, that'd be really good to hear. We'd welcome everyone's changes to the activity; we can always back out a change if it needs to be discussed more, so don't be shy about pushing changes to a branch or asking for direct commit access. (If there's some way to allow anyone with an SL gitorious account to commit directly, that would be an ideal setup.) The GIT tree contains groupthink referenced as a submodule, so to check it out: git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/arithmetic/mainline.git Arithmetic.activity cd Arithmetic.activity git submodule init git submodule update Thanks! - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
