Presentation

Here is a link to the slideshow presentation that we gave earlier today. It's quite a shame that blogger doesn't have any capabilities to host documents.

Oh well.

Presentation

Enjoy

Mission Complete

We have finally finished our game. Game play has been tested for bugs and all known bugs have been fixed. We have smoothed out the GUI and everything flows very well. The game is already up on Google Code and is available for download. There is also a youtube video which demonstrates game play. Just search for 'Geography Game Play'.

Edit: Direct link to video http://youtube.com/watch?v=PTPkOi1Z_Y4

Current Status

We've realized that we aren't going to be able to make today's deadline as initially hoped.

We're nearly done, but there are major concerns about the quality of the storyline. Obviously, since this is an educational application, that is our main objective: teach children. That being said, we don't want to rush through these little learning segments. They are very slow going, because we have to incorporate facts in a colloquial-like tone.

So, our new goal, is to be completely done with the project by the absolute latest, next Friday. We feel like this is more than enough time to sit down and get quality storyline, and to fix any bugs that may present themselves in the final testing of the application.

After the game is completed, we hope to dive into Android. We think the best way to approach it is to create a basic Android app, much like the graphing program we did for the XO at the beginning of the summer. Then, if willing, we could continue the Android project into the Fall and create a rich, useful application.

Update

So, what have we gotten done. Our application works almost flawlessly with the XO. The toolbar is there, and everything works nicely except our music. We have a couple of different songs that play depending on the screen that is selected. However, while run in Sugar, mind you not just on the XO - only on the XO with sugar (gtk on the XO still works fine), the program only plays the first song over and over again.

Personally, I've been working on making the quick synopses of each country we're covering. I've done about 2/3's of them, so that's progress.

We have a general idea for how the traveling to a country will work out.



For example, this is the first photo for the US. There will be a text window below this picture to handle information about the current location and the story line. There will then be a left and right picture with two different landmarks from the US. We're still toying with ideas of when to let the user leave and travel to a different country. We feel like it would probably be best to make sure the user travels to each of the 3 pages per country before his/her lost bird is shown so that they, hopefully, absorb and learn more about the country instead of blindly looking for the bird.

Ben has found some music that we liked, however this said music requires a license from a company. We've been in contact with them, and they are unwilling to give us free use of their music, so we're still toying with ideas of where/how to come up with new songs.

And that's about it.

Game Content + GUI

This is benCho. The project has been going well so far. We have a stable design for our interface for the game and have been working on filling out content. Currently, our main goals are to populate the game with informational content from Wikipedia. We would also like to finalize the GUI so that everything looks and performs smoothly.

The Week

Fairly uneventful week. We've been making changes as we go, fixing up little things. The big one I started to work on near the end was porting it to sugar(again). The toolbar will now show up in the app; however, the secondary windows don't want to load.

I'm hoping it's just a quick sort of fix. Something to do with the loading and unloading of everything, but I'm not so sure. I hope to look at it a little more tonight yet before I go on vacation next week.

Good Day

A lot of little things have been completed.

Music is now working in the application, as well as closing the application correctly exits the entire python script, instead of just the GTK windows.

More pictures have been placed. We are nearing the point where we are going to start implementing the actual gameplay, and thus developing a large database of questions, as well as the user's mode of transportation.

Wednesday

Today has been fairly successful. Not only do we have a fabulous main screen, we have it with changing color buttons.

The next step is adding the story line to the code, and guiding the user along.

As always, the most recent code is up on our google code site, available for read-only checkout through SVN.

Monday Monday Monday

Well, we found a new room. We got tired of sitting in the student lounge, mostly because of the heat in the room, but whatever. We're now located in the Union on the third floor.

We've made some changes to the application over the weekend, but we're really digging down into the storyline and what we want to do.

By the end of the week, I hope that we can have the storyline firmed up, and a rough outline designed, if not coded up.

We're so dedicated, we work on saturday nights!

Despite the copious amount of sex, drugs and rock & roll that define a Saturday night at RPI, I've come up with the a jpeg of our bird for the game, V320.




I myself am not convinced this is the best job we can do, so I'm asking for sugguestions/comments on his design.

-Ryan

Friday Post

So, we've been making adequate progress over the past two days, but the more we talk about the design of the project, and whether or not we're meeting the ultimate goal of creating an educational piece of software, we seem to create more questions of whether or not we are reaching that goal. A big challenge is making this application both educational and fun. I have a feeling that this is going to be a continuing issue through the duration of the progress.

Anyways, Ben and Amit, as far as I know, have been working with testing out certain parts of GTK, trying to make code to do certain tasks, their learning will definitely come in handy later on in the project. Ryan has been playing with gstreamer to play background. He has successfully designed code to loop a certain music file. Personally, I've been working on the general layout. I made a few small changes, but the biggest one is that I've created functionality to allow the user to pick a continent, and then a country within that continent. As always, the project is up on the google code site and available for a read-only checkout through svn.

I'll also post a picture of our idea board. Hopefully we can get a slightly higher quality photo.

Afternoon Summary

I am benCho. We have made progress on our endeavors. Josh has created an excellent draft of what our application's window will look like. It has been uploaded to the SVN Repository. Further tinkering has resulted in a more refined look as well as a colored world map.

Here is a rough outline of our plans:

Topic - Geography
Design - Travel to all parts of the world.
- Get gas/plane ticket to move from country to country by answering relevant questions
- Question types [identify picture, fill in the blanks, multiple choices]

Starting Point - Select starting point from a drop down list.

Our goal will be to search for XO's pet bird [V32O] who has flown away.

Midday Summary

This is Josh. The past few days have been primarily devoted to planning out our activity. What we think we will do is create an application geared towards teaching kids geography.

The premise behind the game is that the user will be OLPC's "mascot" XO. The goal will be to find his lost bird. So, what will happen is that the user must have XO travel across the world, stopping at different countries to pick up clues about where his pet bird has gone, while learning something about the country before being allowed to leave it, and travel to a new country.

Right now, today has been spent trying to figure out what we want our main window to look like, and then implementing that. This afternoon will most likely be spent doing the same.

This is Team Awesome

I am benCho. We are four talented individuals who will be working on developing educational OLPC software. We have successfully completed our mini-project; a simple program, written with Python 2.5, that takes a mathematical function and outputs a graph. Now we are moving on to our main project for the summer, which is still in the design phase. We'll keep you posted.