GSoC’21 Week 1 : Building a solid base

Project Overview

GCompris is a high quality educational software suite, including a large number of activities for children aged 2 to 10, some of the activities are game orientated, but nonetheless still educational.

Currently it has more than 150 educational activities for kids. The goal of GCompris in GSoC’21 is to add more activities. I proposed (proposal link) to add the following activities during GSoC coding period:

• Deplacements : It is a maze activity. The user will be be given a path on the grid. The user has to encode / decode this path, in the form of elementary movements defined by ‘arrow keys’.
• Oware: This is traditional board game, popular in many parts of Africa. The game starts with 48 seeds equally divided between two players. The objective of the game is to capture more seeds than one’s opponent. The game is over when one player has captured 25 or more seeds, or both players have taken 24 seeds each (draw).

Community Bonding Period

During the community bonding period, I discussed the strategy and structure of the activities that I was going to work on during the coding period. I discussed design and also the structure from programming point of view with my mentors: Timothee, Johnny Emmanuel and Deepak . We discussed the requirement of assets for these activities as well.

Before starting with GSoC, I was working on adding 4 different ordering activities to the GCompris project. During the community bonding period, I continued my work on that project, and finished it (Merge Request). Following activities were a part of this merge request:

1. Ordering Numbers

Kids are given a few random numbers to sort in ascending / descending order.

2. Ordering Alphabets

Kids are given a few random letters in their preferred language, and they are asked to order them in ascending / descending order.

3. Ordering Sentences

Kids are given jumbled words and are asked to form a meaningful sentence by reordering them.

4. Ordering Chronology

Kids are given images of events. They have to sort those images in correct chronological order.

First Week Report

During the first week, I worked on building a solid base for the ‘Deplacements’ activity. I initialized a basic structure of the interface, and also initialized a basic structure of the datasets that will be required for this activity.

I took care of the modularity of the code. I kept the code as flexible as I could make it, so that it can be easily extended later on.

One of the major challenges that I am facing right now is to make the layout responsive, and make it adapt to the screen size for vertical devices. One my mentors Timothee Giet suggested me to use states for this, and display the layout according to the state variable. I’m working on it, and I believe I’ll get it working soon.

What next?

I’ll be starting with adding the actual game mechanics logic now. After this, I have to work on 4 different variants / modes of this activity. The base code for all these activities would be common, just special cases need to be handled separately for the individual activities. After finishing this activity, I have to move on the development of the next activity, Oware.

I am having a great time contributing to the project. Each day has a new learning for me. I learn something new everyday in this journey. With the support of awesome mentors, who make sure all our doubts are resolved as soon as possible, it has been a pleasant journey. I am looking forward to complete these activities, and give back to the community.

Last but not the least, thanks for taking out time to read! Stay tuned for further updates!