[Yhslug] porting math game to Pygame for the OLPC laptop

[Phil Shapiro]

hi yhslug community,

    here's an email i received regarding getting my math game, Which Number is
Increasing?, ported for the OLPC child laptop. (see below.)

     just curious if there's anyone here in the yhslug community who'd be
interested in working on this?

     here's a screencast that explains and shows this game in action.

      http://youtube.com/watch?v=j_fy-1stoLw

       here's a newspaper article about the game that appeared on the
front page of the arlington journal back in 1999, when i was working for the
arlington public schools.

http://www.his.com/~pshapiro/arlingtonjournalarticle/

        
          if someone in our group is able to help with this, i'd love for the
splash screen of the game to prominently say that the game was designed by the
Yorktown High School Linux Users Group.

              phil

          
      

----- Forwarded message from Mallory Chua <mchua at spork.dreamhost.com> -----
    Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 21:47:42 -0700 (PDT)
    From: Mallory Chua <mchua at spork.dreamhost.com>
Reply-To: Mallory Chua <mchua at spork.dreamhost.com>
 Subject: Re: would love to share news with my math teacher
      To: Phil Shapiro <pshapiro at his.com>

Hi, Phil!

Which Number Is Increasing is an awesome game, and you can (and should)
definitely make it available online for kids to play. You can even make a
project page on the OLPC wiki for it, so people have a way to find out
about it. A good example of a project page is Kuku:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Kuku

However, in order to be considered as a candidate for inclusion on the
laptop images (the software that actually ships on the physical laptops we
send out, or secondarily and more common, included in the official OLPC
sample library at http://dev.laptop.org/pub/content/Library/) the game
needs to be made into an .xo, which is the special kind of file we use for
activities on the laptop.

If you're interested in doing this (our next release is in 2 months, and
it's entirely possible for WNII to be ready by then), here's what I would
suggest you do.

1. Join the Games mailing list and introduce yourself (go
to lists.laptop.org) and tell them what you're trying to do.

2. Port the game to Pygame(.org) or Flash (although Pygame is likely
easier, and somewhat better-supported by the development community here).
This is easier than it sounds. This is also a really good opportunity for
you to take a bright high schooler or two and use this as an opportunity
to mentor them in software development ("hey kids, want to learn how to
code? I've got a projet for you...")

3. Once the game is converted to Pygame, it needs to be packaged into an
...xo file. A good person to ask about the .xo-ization process in general
would be Mitchell Charity, who's made several of his games into .xo
activities already and has been trying to get more developers through the
process. You can leave a message on his talk page on the wiki
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User_talk:MitchellNCharity) or catch him online
on the #olpc-content channel of irc.freenode.net as user mcharity. Another
good person to contact would be Julius Lucks
<wiki.laptop.org/go/User_talk:Lucks> one of the creators of the Kuku game,
who recently went through the same newbie-to-developer process himself,
and is writing a guide on how to package existing games for the .xo.

So that's how you'd get it included on a laptop image (shipped on a
physical laptop as one of the first games a kid would get on their
computer), or in the games section of the library.

HOWEVER.

I think you can have far, far more impact than simply releasing a single
game right now on the .xo - and in a way that would leverage your existing
content, experience, and skills as well.

How would you like to be, instead of the creator of a single game possibly
released on an XO image at some indeterminate point in time, one of the
coordinators of the OLPC Javascript Game Development Community?

That would mean organizing a development community (starting with yourself
and your stuff) to create and curate something like
http://javascript.internet.com/games/ (but hopefully prettier and more
kid-friendly). We'd then link to your collection in our library.

I know this is a lot - my apologies for not explaining the process for
inclusion on the XO image more clearly before. let me know what you think
and if you have any questions. If you'd like to have a higher-bandwidth
conversation, give me a call at 847.970.8484 (call anytime, I'll typically
pick up unless I'm in a meeting).

Cheers,

-Mel

-- 
Phil Shapiro  pshapiro at his.com
http://www.his.com/pshapiro/briefbio.html
http://philsrssfeed.blogspot.com
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"Wisdom starts with wonder." - Socrates
"Learning happens through gentleness."