Greetings,<br>
<br>
My name is Sarah Frisk. I am working on finishing up my third year at
Colby College in Maine, where we’re finally able to see grass under all
the snow that has piled up this winter. I’m a double major in Computer
Science and English with a concentration in Creative Writing. The
combination has been fun, and somehow I still manage to find time to
embrace my musical side with the violin and tenor sax when I’m not
programming or writing essays. I am familiar with C, Java, Javascript,
HTML, TorqueScript, although lately I’ve found that I’ve been
programming in C a lot for fun – which is partly why I was really
excited about the Tux4Kids program. I have some game development
experience, having taken several classes at Colby on both 2D and 3D
game design. In both classes I also worked heavily in the graphics
department, and I have a background in both Blender and Photoshop. In
previous projects involving Photoshop I have used my Wacom to help
create animated sprites, backgrounds, and GUI (coincidently enough, it
involved drawing a lot of penguins and icebergs). I am familiar with
git, and I am taking a class this semester that includes CVS as part of
our 3d game development group project. I am familiar with programming
on Linux (Ubuntu), Windows, and Mac, although since I do not currently
own a Mac, the majority of my programming/graphics work is done on
Linux and Windows.<br>
<br>
I grew up in Maine, and both my parents work for the Maine public
school systems where the laptop incentive program has been in effect
for several years now. My father has worked closely with the laptop
program from a technical side, setting it up, and working closely with
finding various uses for the laptops in the classroom. The teachers at
this particular school have voiced an interest in educational games
that can be used via a linux server. From discussions with both my
parents and other teachers, I’ve learned that an increasing number of
middle school children do not know the basic things I knew in
elementary school, such as the names of the continents and the oceans.
Perhaps this is because children aren’t finding equivalents to the fun,
engaging educational games I remember growing up with, like “Where in
the World is Carmen Sandiego?”, “Carmen Sandiego Word Detective,”
“Spellbound,” “Math Blasters,” and the various JumpStart games. These
games captivated my brother and me for hours, and along the way we were
learning math, geography, art, typing, astronomy, history, and
everything else along the way. TuxType already seems to be going in
this direction by have a word list of various plants, animals,and an
astronomy list; which seemed to suggest the desire to explore other
areas of education through typing. It is because of this I feel drawn
to projects that Tux4Kids has to offer, especially the Tux Typing game
as it appeals to the English major in me. <br>
<br>
I’ve seen various discussions on the boards for a ‘hangman’ type game
to help teach spelling. If you chose to go in the direction of
teaching spelling (or at least help practice it), the capability of
easily adding your own word lists could be a good example of a useful
tool (part of me thinks I read the idea listed somewhere), a direction
which I would be interested in exploring over the course of the
summer. Speaking as
someone who struggled with spelling when I was little, I found programs
where I was forced to type out my spelling word lists out repeatedly
help me prepare for spelling tests. Also the integration of a program
that possibly analyzes which letters the person playing the game is
getting wrong more often, and then perhaps let the player know in which
areas they need to improve on. A further extension on this could be
the word generators in the games then generating more often words that
have letters that are not in the player's "Strong" category. Has there
been any sort of implementation along this line, or could this possibly
be an idea for a summer project?<br>
<br>I do think that Tux Typing could go farther than
that, although it’s certainly not something that can be completed in
just one summer. Possible ideas include a game that includes typing
that helps to explore the various continents of the world, or famous
cities, thereby helping teach children a little bit about geography
along the way. Typing the wrong letters could lead to something as
simple as Tux not having enough fuel in his plane to get from North
America to Europe, for example. Another one that I’ve considered
that would take the
collaboration of many people would be the possibility of encouraging
reading. Since Tux Typing is geared for younger children, I could see
taking Early Reader level books (stuff like "How the Grinch Stole
Christmas," the “I Can Read Books” series, etc), books with text and
pictures, and have the children have to type the text before they go to
the next page. Obviously using stuff like "How the Grinch Stole
Christmas" has its own copyright issues, which is why I suggest that
this project has a much larger scope than just a summer project, since
you would need a large repository of stories and images to use that it
would legal to use. But you could easily do a whole bunch of stories
about various Tux adventures. What does the community possibly think of
an ideas like these for future development?<br>
<br>
I'm looking forward to the possibility of working with Tux4Kids for GSoC.<br><font color="#888888">
<br>
-Sarah</font>