[Hamara-devel] Should hamara be an educational distribution or an edutainment distribution ?

[shirish]

Hi all,
This is something I have been thinking about for quite sometime. I would 
argue for the latter, sharing ideas and examples and hoping for feedback.

1. The difference between the two is enormous, as the repository would 
double in size than what just having educational software and tools 
would be (not thinking of development tools but know they would be there 
as well.)

2. When I will be saying 'by people' I mean students and teachers in 
schools, not us, we would be providing more of enabling services rather 
than taking an active role in such projects.

3. The value of an edutainment distribution would be enormous provided 
though we have people who can use and add value to it. Few games which 
have enormous learning potential :-

a. Minetest - one of the many open-source implementation of minecraft. 
While anybody who has played minecraft even for a while would know how 
addictive it is, it also has lot of potential for learning and there are 
whole communities dedicated to modding minecraft. Minetest is just one 
of those in debian

See :-

[$] aptitude search minetest
 

i   minetest                                                        - 
Multiplayer infinite-world block sandbox
i   minetest-data                                                   - 
Multiplayer infinite-world block sandbox (data files)
p   minetest-dbg                                                    - 
Multiplayer infinite-world block sandbox (debugging symbols)
p   minetest-mod-mobf                                               - 
Minetest mod providing a framework for creating mobs
p   minetest-mod-moreblocks                                         - 
Minetest mod - More Blocks
p   minetest-mod-moreores                                           - 
Minetest mod - More Ores
p   minetest-mod-pipeworks                                          - 
Minetest mod - Pipeworks
p   minetest-mod-worldedit                                          - 
Minetest mod - in-game world editor
p   minetest-server                                                 - 
Multiplayer infinite-world block sandbox (server)


Github has close to 150 repositories which have various mods of 
minecraft happening. I would probably do a detail snapshot of minetest 
and some of the other popular open-source mods for minecraft which are 
out there. It is easy to say that kids love it and in the Indian context 
would be much more useful than elsewhere for number of reasons. We could 
be in position to build more unique tools and objects with the variety 
of cultures we have. Potential is just enormous.

2. 0ad - See play0ad.com . Good thing about this game :-

a. Uses blender so could be used to show 3d assets and how they are 
modelled, vertices and what all goes into planning a AAA game. It is not 
AAA game but comes close to it.

b. History and Research - If people have hung around the wildfire forums 
a bit they would see whole lot of research specifically with history 
goes in there. There are lot of history buffs in the forum.

In fact 0ad has people from Maurya dynasty in-game which is a good 
starting point to learn our own history. There is much that can be 
improved upon the civilization if we have people who are willing to do 
this.

c. Strategy :- The game itself is billed as a medieval strategy game 
with timelines, so people have to constantly balance between different 
resources and risks they need to take. There are lot of 'let's play' 
videos that can be seen on youtube to have a sense of both the 
playability and the various strategies that the players follow with the 
playthroughs.


There are many, many such games which have the potential for enriching 
the distribution as well as make it easier to penetrate educational 
institutes as well.

Looking for feedback from people on what they think of the above, there 
are and would be other criteria that we would need to have so that we 
always have fresher and better developed communities than there are atm 
but that's a topic for another day.

Till later.
-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org