I've recently had some inspiration regarding the Memorize activity. (The reason for which I refer to it as Memorize, and not Memosono, will become apparent shortly.)
We should take serious advantage of the nature of the game - which depends on matching pairs - by turning it into a flashcard style learning tool. Right now we've got some composers, with audio cues. It's a step above average, but in the end, you just find the two cards that match. What if instead, half of the cards were pictures, and half of the cards were the corresponding words; or half of the cards are numbers, and the other half are simple math problems that have equal values; or half of the cards are pictures of instruments, and the other half are their sounds, etc. There are many variations on this idea, and all of them would help teach kids a different skill. The simplest variation would be simple picture matching, which we should keep for the young kids, but there would also be modes for learning vocabulary, math, music, etc. Additionally, expanding the dictionary of possible cards (by a lot) seems pretty necessary, since the fixed set of composers gets old after a few plays. Each set should have a large number of cards, and the cards shown in any given game should be chosen randomly from the set when the game starts. Now, getting to the really exciting issue, we should also make this game extensible, so that educators in each country can create expansion sets to install. That makes it infinitely scalable to different age groups, and removes the core problem of localization. They can make the game relevant to their country, their age group, their current topic of study. Talk about a good way to study for exams...the kids could even make sets themselves! I think if there's any way to get this into G1, we'll have an extremely powerful teaching tool that will be a great way for each country/school to explore the mesh capabilities. It also gives the teachers a simple entry point for creating educational content, disguised as an entertaining game. I'm a UI guy, and I'd be happy to help out with the visual design for this. Do those of you on the implementation end of things think we can accomplish such a goal? I think it would be awesome, and go a long way to supporting the idea of the laptop as an educational tool. - Eben _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/sugar
