Re: [Tuxmath-devel] Tux4kids in GSOC 2012

[Brendan L. <che...@gm...>]

Hi David, et. al.,

Evidently, this thing failed to send and I've had it sitting in drafts 
for a week. D'oh! I'm glad to do what I can, if anyone else wants to 
step up as well...I'd imagine having only one mentor won't fly for GSoC.

The GDC is March 5-9, so I won't have too many spare cycles to write up 
ideas and such, unfortunately. I might be able to crank out a paragraph 
or two :)

IIRC, Tux4Kids participated in some nominal fashion last summer. Was 
that a sort of off-the-record mini-SoC?

Best,
Brendan
> David Bruce <mailto:dav...@gm...>
> February 23, 2012 4:56 PM
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> Who is interested in mentoring for GSOC this year?  The organization 
> application period opens Feb 27, and the deadline is Mar 9.  If we are 
> going to participate, we need to get our mentors and our "ideas" page 
> lined up in the next few days.
>
Barring any sudden catastrophes, I should actually be around this summer 
and glad to mentor.
>
> Sadly, I've generally had less and less time for Tux4kids over the 
> last couple of years.  I can do the general admin stuff, but any GSOC 
> projects are going to need someone else to be the primary mentor.  I 
> still can fill in on an ad hoc basis if someone goes on vacation or 
> gets sick.
>
Such is life. It boggles my mind whenever I think of everything you do 
for the org. In your position, I'd have been burned out long ago. By my 
reckoning, you'd warrant, on average, one delicious cake every other day 
for extraordinary contribution. If only I could bake.
>
> As for ideas on the tuxmath/tuxtype side, a couple things stand out:
> 1.  Finally get tuxtype "ported" to use t4kcommon.  Tuxtype 
> development has basically been on hold for a while waiting for this.
>
Guess I'll take this one. Has there been any recent survey of the situation?
>
> 2.  SDL 2.0 is finally out, and we should probably move to it.  I'm 
> not sure this would be enough for an entire project.
>
Woah, when did this happen? Last I checked, 1.3 was still a distant 
point on the horizon.  Cool!
>
> 3.  It would be great to finally get some releasable code from 
> tux4kids-admin.
>
Agreed. Are schools generally using the text-based admin tools of yore? 
And/or their own ragtag config methods?

How about the network game? I haven't gotten to play around with it, but 
I would assume it could use some polish of its own?
>
> On a wider scale, I am increasingly convinced that it would be 
> worthwhile to have our project release some educational kids software 
> for smartphones and tablets.  From a licensing standpoint, only 
> Android is fully and unequivocally compatible with the GPL.  However, 
> if we write new apps from scratch we would be free to choose a 
> different license (it just has to be a Free Software/Open Source 
> license).  My thought is that we could write some educational 
> minigames in Java that could be adapted to be Android app, Java 
> applets, or Java webstart applications while sharing most all the same 
> code.  I've been learning Java and Android with this in mind, but I 
> don't think I know it well enough to be a proper mentor.
>
I'm comfortable with general Android dev, but games are a different 
beast entirely. I'd fully support this kind of effort, though. Another 
strong option to consider is some kind of HTML5/JavaScript based 
platform because, generally, any given smart* or iDevice can (or will) 
support it, not to mention old fogey computers, too. The caveat to that 
is you might have to forfeit the ability to use fancy touch/gyro 
input--however, I have heard of tools that can give you even that 
through web programming.

Either way, the high-level development all the cool kids are doing these 
days make it so easy to get a working product down quickly and 
painlessly, that I'd have zero qualms about losing the existing codebase 
and starting from scratch.

FWIW, I've finally gotten my hands on a shiny Apple computer, so our Mac 
ports may (fingers crossed) finally get some TLC.

Best,
Brendan
>
> As always, I defer to the Tux Paint folks for all issues related to them.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> David Bruce
>
>