hello all!

Here are some updates. with great feedback from my mentors bruno coudoin and johnny jazeix, it has been possible to refine the activities to a very good state.

programming Maze activity

It has been an awesome learning experience to do this activity. You can choose instructions which you want to execute to move the tux, it processes them and highlights the current instruction being executed.

drag and drop instructions

You can drag and drop the chosen instructions in the grid view. It gives the user freedom to replace instruction or inserting between the already chosen instructions. Initially it was seeming hard task, but once our mentors give us a helping hand to start, things get going.

procedures

You can define procedures and call them from main code. switching between defining code and procedure was made easy. This was another awesome suggestion from Johnny jazeix. previously there were instructions like define P, call P, end P. Now we can click on the corresponding header and start editing that part(main or procedure).

screen shot

lang activity

Here is the summary of work on this activity.

saving the progress

During this time i The most important thing, the user feedback on how much we have learned. The progress is now stored. It was a nice experience to discuss in community and finally reach a decision after discussion with mentors.

favorites

You can mark your favorite categories of words and also the work for sorting activities on basis of favorites is done.

screen shot

Hello all,

Excited to tell you about my journey. I have passed the mid term evaluation. It has been an awesome journey. So I have almost completed the Lang activity, we can say it is sum of my first three activities altogether. I have started my fourth activity that is Programming Maze.

Getting Ideas from community

One task is to save the progress of learnt words permanently. There are various choices we have to implement it like through json or qml using ActivityBase. JohnnyJ(Johnny Jaziex) suggested me to ask it on mailing list. And it has given me an experience of how the community works. It is really nice to see people caring about each other’s work and see your work’s importance. Second task is to give an option to choose your favorite categories. It can be integrated with the main menu’s favorite menu or in the activity itself. I am working on them this week.

Program the Tux

My next activity is based on teaching the kids to program with an interactive game. The goal of activity is to Program the tux in such a way that it makes a path to reach the goal. There are instructions like moveForward, turnLeft, turnRight to be chosen from. And once you code and press OK, just wait and see the magic of your code.
I am doing the designing part of it and here is how it looks as of now,

And here is a pic from my cool GSoC diary,

It will be an awesome activity. In the end i would like to mention the most important thing i learnt, creative work takes time so instead of hurrying into a solution we need to properly plan and see what are pros and cons of available options. I experienced it while i discussed about my last task in Lang. There is so much to learn from mentors and the real work which GSoC provides us an opportunity too.

My code in kde quickgit

Here are my branches in kde quickgit
Lang Activity
Program The Tux

See you soon with a completely amazing Programming Maze activity soon.

Hello everyone!

Its two weeks since the GSoC has started. I am working on the port of lang activities. It includes the basic details activity, three quiz mini games related to the words we just learnt in the previous level and then a spell It activity based on the same dataset of the current level.

work

I have pushed the code for quiz mini games integration. That is my second activity. It was planned to be completed in 2 weeks.I am almost on time with my proposal timeline. Have to make some improvements in it as JohnnyJ has suggested. It is in review process.

learned

I have learned a lot during this period. Special thanks to my mentors bruno coudoin and johnny jazeix for their guidance and availability for asking doubts. I learned the work flow of model-view-data. For answer buttons, i used delegates with two elements. Initially I was thinking of having two list views for images and words seperately but JohnnyJ suggested that we can do it with single list view with more than one items in the delegate.

some code

the delegate for quiz answer options

1

delegate: Item{
    id: wordListViewDelegate
    width: wordListView.width
    height: wordListView.buttonHeight

    Image{
        id: wordImageQuiz
        width: wordListView.width/3
        height: wordListView.buttonHeight * 0.7
        source: image
        z: 7
        anchors.left: parent.left
        anchors.leftMargin: 10* ApplicationInfo.ratio
        visible:  (Activity.miniGame==1) ? true : false  // to hide images after first mini game
    }

    AnswerButton {id: wordRectangle...}
}

screencast

This is screencast of my lang activity after two weeks of coding period. I have done the basic details activity and quiz integration with 3 mini games.
I. you have to answer by watching images+text
II. you have to answer only with text options
III. you can only hear the word and answer only with text options.

Thats it for now. See you soon with complete port of lang activity. Happy Coding.

GCompris

I am going to work on GCompris, a complete education suite for kids from age 2 to 10.

My project

Looking forward to an awesome summer, where i will create reading and computer learning activities for GCompris. These will focus on learning while play for kids under age group 2 to 10.

Learning how to program is like learning any other language. The difference, of course, is that programming can be much more powerful. With just a computer, kids can use the skills they learn to build something that might change the world.

Language learning in particular require long and complex process to learn. Overall, reading methods must be resilient to the vicissitudes of implementation. Books alone are not sufficient to keep children’s interested in languages. A game which will be fun to play for them can be a good early start for learning for every children.

Mentors

I found one of the best mentors Bruno Coudoin (@bdoin) and Johnny Jazeix (@JohnnyJ), who are according to me best mentors i have ever seen ( as much as i know from discussion with my friends about their mentoring organizations). I am lucky to work under their guidance. They always come up with innovative ideas and caress there dream GCompris.

People behind it

Srishti sethi (@SrishAkaTux), GSoCer,GCompris and shashikant vaishnav (@shashitechno) GSoCer,moodle are most influential seniors i have came across. I remember the talks by shashikant boss about open source and their evening tea sessions with me, that enthusiasm that they carried is what i want to carry forward. Srishti sethi is the single person whom i have seen always positive about everything. From the day when boss said siddhesh, why don’t you speak up about your ideas and views, i have grown up from a shy one to a mature one.

Conf.kde.in and pradeepto are also an milestone to this journey. want to thank pradeepto specially for making everyone believe in themselves. i can still hear your words echoing. ;)

Seeing the happiness of them after getting into GSoC was one of the memorable feeling i have ever had. Thank you for being angles :)

My friends

Richa Rupela and Ayush Sharma, for always standing by my side during the period of applying for gcompris. Loved to discuss the activities and ideas with them the most, they are always the first to know if i am working well or not, also the first one to boost my moral if i feel a bit off. special thanks to you guys, we are more than friends and we will believe in ourselves no matter what :)

The thank you list can’t be said complete without mentioning Kamlesh, Dinesh bhadana, monish,rakesh and abhishek for providing their valuable feedback and support throughout the period.

About me

I am a final year student pursuing my bachelor of engineering and technology in Information Technology at Govt. Engineering college bikaner, Rajasthan Technical University, India. I am open source enthusiast and familiar with FOSS since more than one year now.

Currently working on GCompris, under KDE umbrella. Looking forward to make these activities as intuitive and sublime as i can.

Here is a link to my GSOC Proposal

Cheers!

(Siddhesh Suthar)