Category archives: Young Coders

Projects related to young people and computers, including young people learning to code and the One Laptop Per Child project.

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Lowering Spew Volume in Activities (Set the logging level, but what's setting it high?)


Since I burned a few hours trying to track this down, I'll post the work-around... the problem is simple; Log Spew.

Productive uses Python's logging module throughout to provide debugging and informational output during development. We log enormous amounts of information at debug and info levels (about 2.5% of our total run-time is spent in ...

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Productive Running In-situ (Network transmitting information (that's what networks do))


Yesterday I managed to finish hooking up enough of the networking that the game can start while running as an activity and the status updates flow properly from the server to the clients. We did the "lobby" code all using the olpcgames wrapper's built-in functionality, with the actual game code using an ExportedGObject for efficiency ...

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Productively Networking (almost) (A few bugs fixed in olpcgames)


Either no-one has ever used olpcgames.mesh or they have all fixed a number of broken pieces individually. I fixed one show-stopping bug today that would have meant no activity could properly track the users in the channel.

Anyway, I *think* I'm going down the right path for the networking. Will see as I get the ...

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What does it take to be "part" of the OLPC project? (On predatory perceptions and porting...)


Had a very interesting conversation this morning with a volunteer out in the field (which is to say, in a developing nation) about the opinion being observed that Intel's Classmate is just as much a part of the OLPC project as the XO. There's a perception among those observers that the joining of the board[1] ...

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Need to get Develop Developing (Get Productive out the door first I suppose...)


My OLPC priorities at the moment:

* get Productive finished
* use what we've learned from Productive to fix OLPCGames
* get Develop development restarted, produce at least a simple, straight forward IDE similar to SciTE built, tested and delivered
* find people to work on porting to EEE and Classmate
* find people to ...

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Productive Integration Under Way (Longish day of refactoring...)


Got the rendering test code refactored into a set of widgets and then moved those widgets to the UI screen where they are supposed to live. Got all that done and then realised that the demo simulation doesn't work under the olpcgames wrapper because the pygame timer doesn't fire into the wrapped olpcgame queue. Sigh. ...

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We have a Productive Project (Git tree and everything...)


Productive now has an official, public source archive. The spike test for graphics and simulation is available in spikes/spike_render.py for those who want to start playing.

I've been playing with some scaling tests... will need to do some work there to make larger maps usable, both for the UI (for moving units long distances) ...

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The cold hard world of Productive (Starvation and death states added)


Just dropped in Miguel's updated graphics for the starving and dead states for the characters. Poor little characters now "suffer" (deflate) and die (turn to bones) if you don't take care of them properly.

You want to create a battle-hardened army and take over the world? You better have the productive capacity to feed all ...

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A Productive few hours (Little bits and pieces...)


Got the game-state pack/restore code working. That should let us build a situation-editing tool so that teachers can build situations for students to solve. It's also useful for being able to walk away from a game and pick it up, of course.

Added a quick-and-dirty overview map implementation to the spike test. Need to get ...

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Quick-porting Applications via AUFS (Spike test of a sort...)


Tried a bit of a spike test today. The idea is to try to make it easier to port an X11 application to the XO by using an overlay FS to capture what an installation does and then annotating the results with information to let Sugar launch the overlay.

Basic pattern is as follows:

* ...

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