[Tuxmath-devel] GSoC 2012 potential - my introduction and some ideas for mobile

[Kento L. <me...@kl...>]

Good day ladies and gentlemen!

I sent out a similar email yesterday to tux4kids-discuss, but since then 
have been informed that this list is more active. So I apologize in 
advance for the repetition (which is really just the next paragraph).

My name is Kento Locatelli, and I'm a 3rd year undergraduate in Computer 
Science and Engineering. I would like to develop a new (not ported) 
mobile tux4kids app under the Google Summer of Code for the tux4kids 
family. I have a fair amount of experience in a wide range of area which 
I won't go into for brevity, but suffice it to say I believe I am 
technically fit for the project.

The reason I'm in favor of new non-ported mobile tux4kids apps is that 
the existing software don't seem "fit" for mobile phones (aside from 
TuxPaint, but similar albeit non-FOSS apps already exist). For example, 
Math command would work well on a tablet... but most mobile devices are 
phones, and fitting that game on a small screen wouldn't be a pleasant 
experience. Plus the target demographic is more likely to have a cheap 
android phone than an iPad tablet.

So what new mobile-friendly games do I propose instead? I am still 
working on specifics, and I'll provide more detailed write ups or 
sketched later this week (after I finish a couple midterms)... but I'd 
still like to share the concepts I've had so far.

- Math racer (vertical screens): I'm sure everyone's familiar with the 
classic 2d racing game where your car steadily speeds up and you have to 
steer between other race cars and avoid a crash. Lets take that idea and 
invert it, where the car automatically steers and you have control of 
the speed. The top half of the screen would display your car steering, 
maybe with the standard little semi-transparent race track overlay. 
Toggleable to show your position, high speed, etc. The lower half would 
be your "gas pedal". Equations! An equation would display, and below 
that would be various options for the solution. for example "9 + 5 = ?" 
and options "95 59 12 14...". The faster you solve your problems, the 
faster your car goes. The advantage of this game is after it's 
developed, it would be fairly easy to modify it to support algebra ("9 + 
2x = 15") or have toggle-able operations (so a parent teaching their 
child addition could have only addition, and then select subtract, 
multiplication, etc as the child progresses). And I rather like the idea 
of tracking how fast equations of various types are solved, so progress 
can be visualized. Plus penguins driving race cars? Seriously, always 
awesome.

- Worder (horrible name): This game is for teaching parts of speech, so 
it would be helpful for students learning english regardless of their 
age (and actually, it should be easy to port the game for learning other 
languages as well). Basically it's the river portion of frogger (but 
with a penguin and ice floes, instead of a frog and logs). Your penguin 
has a part of speech (ie a Noun penguin), and to cross the river it has 
to hop across word ice floes with the appropriate part of speech.

- Something along the lines of oregon trail, with more 
historical/geographic accuracy and less dysentery/death.

- Music composer: This is probably the least viable for a GSoC project, 
but it's something I personally repeatedly wanted as a kid. Basically, 
the idea is the name. To simplify the project, it could be turned into a 
music tracker like Sonant (or Sonant live: 
http://sonantlive.bitsnbites.eu/). I haven't thought of a great way to 
fit it on a small screen, but I know it can be done. Musical education 
is just as important as anything else!

Note again these are just very early concepts I've worked on a little 
bit between tasks since yesterday. I'm sure better ones will come up 
after I have time to actually spend brainstorming later this week, but I 
still want to know how I'm doing so far.

As far as the technical platform goes, I'm in favor of the 
HTML5/JavaScript/Phonegap stack suggested previously. Appcelerator might 
be another potential platform which also compiles down to 
objective-c/java. Google offers PlayN too, which compiles Java to 
desktop Java, HTML5, Android and iOS (so new apps could be both mobile 
*and* desktop). PlayN's community support is rather lacking though...  
Again, I'll do more research later in the week to see if there aren't 
any buried gems out there.

All the best,
Kento Locatelli