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

[shirish]

addition in-line :-

On 05/11/2015 11:33 PM, shirish wrote:
> 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.

Just to make sure that I'm not talking out of my ass did a small search 
for just few days and while there was a barrage of answers, you can see 
one which sits right in the UK.

See https://vimeo.com/126526700 as an e.g.

> 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