What's Schoolsplay
Schoolsplay is a new project based on Childsplay and it will become a program that offers various educational activities and the educational "fun and games" activities currently found in Childsplay.
Schoolsplay tries to address the design problems in Childsplay by using a more object oriented (OO) design. This will make Schoolsplay more robust and scalable as well as allow for easier customization by the user.
In addition to the design considerations Schoolsplay will also add extensive data collecting, per user, to the various activities.
The database used to store this data can be any SQL based database as schoolsplay support all the major databases like SQLite, Postgres, MySQL, and Oracle.
Besides the "fun and games" activities Schoolsplay will also have activities which will have more educational
value and targeted at classrooms.
Because the two kind of activities needed a different GUI it was decided to split the activities in two packages.
The two packages are named Schoolsplay and Childsplay where Schoolsplay has the "classroom"
activities and Childsplay the educational "fun and games" activities.
Childsplay:
Childsplay is targeted at home users and uses a more colorful frontend than schoolsplay.
The activities have a more "fun and games" feel to it.
Childsplay has all the activities found in the old childsplay, version < 0.90.
Cognitionplay:
This is a variant of Childsplay but tailored to be used in a hospital to treat patients with mental diseases.
The differences would mainly be in the selection of activities, looks and sounds.
The patients would be older or elderly people so the look and feel will be less 'childish' than in Childsplay.
The development of this variant is done in cooperation with a therapist from a Austrian clinic.
Schoolsplay:
This isn't released yet, it's rather complete and stable but only has two activities and a lot of small bugs.
Schoolsplay uses GTK as it's graphical frontend and is developed to run on the OLPC XO.
It will contain many activities that are suitable to be used in classrooms and will provide extensive data collecting and a multiuser environment with passwords.
The target is the XO laptop but it will also run on any Python supported platform. The reason for targeting the XO laptop is that the OLPC project donated a laptop to develop an educational program like schoolsplay.
The code of this version is available in SVN branch 'olpc-branch'.
Finally I would like to point out that everything in the schoolsplay project is licensed under the GPL version 3.
See the Contacts page for additional information and contact info.
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