Re: Modest idea

[Kent Schumacher <kent structural-wood com>]

My 8 year old son used to play educational games at school and a lot of them seemed
to share the same interface.

I would call them interactive stories.  Essentially the interface is a screen
that is split vertically.  The top 60% is a lightly animated page, and the bottom
40% is text.  By lightly animated I mean clocks on the wall may have a swinging
pendulum, branches may wave in the wind, etc...

If the child clicks on items on the screen, frequently they will go into an animation
sequence - for example pressing on a frog may cause him to jump, or turn into a
prince.  Often the animations have nothing to do with the story line, although they
don't detract from it.

The bottom text portion of the screen is usually a paragraph (much like the format
of childrens books).  A nice voice reads the paragraph slowly and the words highlight
themselves as the text is read.

After the reading the page is essentially idle except for the light animation
sequences.  Pressing on items still activates the item animation sequences.  There are page
forward, page back, re-read, and exit icons on the screen.

My son played these when he was four years old and is just now growing bored
of them.   They are beautifully drawn and cleverly animated.  The plots of the story
are primarily boilerplate and often moralistic - you know, smack a nerd and watch
him grow into a hacker that writes something like gnome which takes away all of
bill gates money... well, maybe not.

This would be a great gnome project and would really push linux.  I've often wished
I could propose a linux alternative to the schools high buck mac and pc computer systems.
Diskless linux systems coupled to a linux server would add up to huge hardware and
administrative savings for a school.  Unfortunately there is little if any educational software
at this point.

Well, maybe more than you asked for, but...
Kent

Miles Lane wrote:

> It would be helpful if you would give more detail on what sort
> of educational games you are talking about.  There is a tremendous
> variety of approaches to educational software including game-like
> interfaces, pictographic/storybook interfaces and so on.  What's
> missing, that you need?
>
> I suppose some rapid development tools would be nice.  But, I imagine
> each type of game would require its own rapid development tool set.
>
>         Miles
>
> Jrme Marant wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > Linux lacks educational (Lesson for children, etc) and cultural applications
> > (Fine arts, Nature, etc).
> > These kinds of applications are, with games, a reason for choosing an
> > OS rather than an other one.
> > IMHO, It could be nice to have a workshop tool for producing such
> > applications. I don't know
> > if this already exists or is in progress.
> >
> > This tool could feature (messy but just keep the idea)
> > - standard GNOME features like XML, gnome-db, gtkhtml, etc.
> > - Unified interface for all created applications
> > - Step by step CD production up to CD burning
> > - generation of a installation executable that would run the
> >   application from a CD
> >
> > Any interest ? Anything planned ?
> >
> > Jerome.
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--
Kent Schumacher

Structural Wood Corporation
4000 Labore Rd.
St. Paul, MN 55110

Phone: (651) 426-8111
Fax: (651) 426-6859
e-mail: kent@structural-wood.com