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

[shirish]

in-line :-

On 05/08/2015 11:04 PM, Vikas Tara wrote:
>
> On 06/05/15 17:20, shirish wrote:
>> 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.
> +1 for edutainment - it's much more likely to gel with young users if
> there are games involved.

I had the same thought process and was the idea behind putting the idea 
across.

> Thanks for the minetest pointer - I hadn't seen that before and my kids
> are minecraft addicts. They will be apt-getting it this evening :)

Were your kids able to play with minetest ? How was the experience for 
you while installing and configuring it and how was their experience of 
the game.

> I was thinking of a wiki section and blog posts around gaming - so
> perhaps a few of us can devote some time to that?

This actually is a huge topic as games in Debian is huge but sadly an 
underlooked topic and blend. There are lot of 80's and 90's arcade games 
which have been ported over to FOSS and then to Debian. There is still 
huge quantity of such games which need love and porting over to newer 
toolkits and ways of playing games. I know of few DD's who took the 
games already ported, bought the old arcade machines for a song, took 
out all the old electronics and put an embedded SBC (raspberry pi, 
beagleblone etc.), used whatever shields they had to use to map those 
old controller buttons to the SBC and sell it back for a profit + AMC to 
various retro gaming places, senior homes and other places.

I would need to dig deep in my mailbox but it's possible I could fish 
out those blog posts and those people who did that.

While the above doesn't make big bucks, the same can't be said about 
hacked/modified Xbox's , Playstations and you name it gaming thing. All 
have been more or less successfully penetrated with pretty good chances 
of loading Debian + games on these machines. I say chances as I haven't 
kept up-to-date on those efforts. The last I heard was, that even the 
PS4 had its defences broken and we were able to load Debian on it.

In either ways, what I am saying is that there's whole lot of hardware + 
games play that we could play if we wanted to do. Just would need bit of 
in-house expertise on the various knobs of the various kind of hardware 
and what is required to map it.

As far as blog posts and wiki about gaming is concerned, would gladly 
contribute to it. For instance gcompris itself has around 150 games (or 
activities as it's only developer says) so just documenting them would 
be a task. Could be one blog post for documenting at the most 2 
activities. This would be besides having a blog post which gives some 
simple ways to change some of the variables in the game. In some games 
there might be a .conf which will help us to do that, others might not 
in which case talk to the developer concerned. The mind is simply 
bubbling with lot of possibilities, only a fraction of which I have 
shared above.

Looking forward to feedback on all the above.


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