[gcompris-devel] Possible extension for scale?

[Bruno Coudoin]

Le dimanche 28 juin 2009 à 16:38 +0200, Wolfram Sang a écrit :
> Hello,
> 
> my girlfriend meanwhile successfully used gcompris in a 4th grade class 
> to teach about "weight". As the time pressure of this deadline is gone 
> now, I am finally able to ask if you maybe are interested in one of our 
> extensions. You can find a screenshot here:
> 
> http://www.the-dreams.de/projects/gcompris-scale.jpg
> 
> As you can see, the weights are not just "1,2,5,10" anymore. The game 
> now works with a granularity of 1g, so the weights in our sets range 
> from 100g to 3000g. An additional thing is, that weights of "n * 500g" 
> can also be expressed in kg, so the children need to convert the unit. 
> (This is an objective for 4th grade maths in Lower Saxony/Germany)

I like it but the current one makes sense also. It is more about
learning addition and subtractions than weight itself. In your plan, are
you proposing to replace it or there will be both ?

> One thing which makes me hesitate is that there may be parts of the 
> world, where g and kg are not primarily used? Then again, it is a SI-unit.

Yes, we do our best to make GCompris a useful tool for all the different
countries and respect their differences. But you are true that as a
SI-unit we can expect that this is teach in most countries, even if it
is not their default system.

> At the moment, our extension has an own source-file. Before a possible 
> inclusion, I would need to do a bit of refactoring, as I think the 
> original scale.c could hold both versions, selectable using "mode". 
> Before I do that, I just wanted to know if there is interest and if so, 
> my idea of patching scale.c seems apropriate?

Definitely yes. More, if you could make your code flexible enough to
accept non metric weight that would be perfect but this is not
mandatory.


-- 
Bruno Coudoin
http://gcompris.net  Free educational software for kids
http://toulibre.org  Logiciel Libre à Toulouse
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