[gcompris-devel] New activity, the hangman

[Bruno Coudoin]

Le jeudi 26 août 2010 à 23:14 -0400, Fionn Ziegler a écrit :
> My school-kids love the
> "KHangman" game. But they don't play it without an hint. So every word have
> description like "Monday". hint: "A weekday...". may be you're able to use
> some stuff of the KHangman game!?

I did not remember khangman when I started one in GCompris. Yes this is
a very good implementation from our friends of Kde-Edu.

I am looking at their kvtml file format in which they store words and
hints. One option could be to make GCompris compatible with their
format. 

Looking at what they did, they don't use the regular po files for the
translations. We also don't use po files for our word list.

In my original ideas this list of words was not appropriate for
translations because a list of simple words for one language may not
match a list for another language. Doing so implies that only words
meaningful for english children will be proposed in other languages.

The big drawback of having separate files is that it is not very well
translated. Translators tends to focus on po files only. This is true
for KdeEdu files and for GCompris one's.

At the time our projects started there was nothing on the web,
especially with a free software license attached. Now thinks have
changed, there are a lot of free contents. For example, we could extract
the relevant data we are interested in from Wikipedia to base our list
on. This option is especially appealing, I don't know if this is true
for all languages but for French Wiktionary there is the word type,
definition and also have the spoken version of the word. Having this
data would bring a lot of new possible activities in GCompris.

So one option is to work with KdeEdu files, be compatible with their
files and do our best to let our translators be able to contribute to
KdeEdu to update or improve these files. The other I have in mind is to
grab data from wiktionary and recreate xml files suitable for our word
based activities.

I have no definitive answer, this  are just my thoughts. I copied the
KdeEdu community, they will probably have an idea on the topic.

Bruno.