[gcompris-devel] testers needed for new music activities in GCompris

[Beth Hadley]

Hello GCompris users, developers, and lovers,

I'm Beth Hadley and I've spent my summer working on making music activities
for GCompris through Google Summer of Code. My intent with these activities
is to introduce children to the joy of music through both exploratory and
educational music related activities.

You will find a complete summary of the six activities I developed,
including screenshots, here:
https://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2012/Projects/BethHadley_GCompris_Music

In brief, my activities are:
piano_composition: An activity to learn how the piano keyboard works, and
how notes are written on a musical staff. Students explore music
composition by loading and saving their work. (Note: this activity has a
feature to load "pre-saved" melodies. I'm trying to collect melodies from
around the world! So please send me melodies from your country, all I need
is the name of the melody, country of origin, lyrics, and melody line (as a
picture, text, or any format I can read).
note_names-activity: Learn the names of the notes, in bass and treble
clef, with the help of sounds and colors.
play_piano: Learn to play melodies on the piano keyboard.
play_rhythms: Learn to listen to, read, and play musical rhythms.
explore_world_music: Learn about the music of the world, and recognize the
location of certain music clips.
explore_farm_animals: Learn about farm aimals, what sounds they make, and
interesting facts about them.

To develop these activites, I created a module, gcomprismusic, which
contains many useful methods and classes for developing music activities in
gcompris. Therefore, I have created extensive documentaiton for this module
at
http://gcompris.net/wiki/Adding_a_music_activity_and_using_gcomprismusic.py_module
for
any future developers who wish to use my classes to build more music
activities. I am more than happy to help mentor and assist you if you wish
to work on a music activity for GCompris.

Also, I created a template activity, the explore template, which allows
developers to quickly make an activity on a certain topic by just writing a
text file (no coding required). Making an explore activity is a great
introduction to how gcompris activities are built, and you don't need to
have much experience. I created extensive documentation on how to use my
template at http://gcompris.net/wiki/Adding_an_explore_activity and I'm
also very happy to help you if you're interested in making an explore
activity.

Lastly, I've bundled all my activities and I would very much appreciate it
if you could test out some of them and send me feedback. I'm doing this a
bit differently than Matilda did hers, so here are my instructions. PLEASE
if you're having ANY trouble, just send me an email or catch me on IRC and
I'd be more than happy to help!

1. Download the bundle:
For unix users, download .tar.gz from this link: *
http://mit.edu/bhadley/Public/beth_hadley_music_activities.tar.gz*
For windows users, download zip from this link:*
http://mit.edu/bhadley/Public/beth_hadley_music_activities.zip**
*2. Extract/decompress/detar the bundle (On Ubuntu: right click --> Extract
Here (on ubuntu) or do it with the terminal) It doesn't really matter where
you extract your files to for now...just keep them in a safe place on your
computer so that you can relocated them easily to where they need to go in
step 3.
3. Enter the folder beth_hadley_music_activities and you will see two
folders: boards and python. You must copy the contents of each into the
respective folder where gcompris is loaded. In other words, copy the entire
contents of the boards folder into the boards folder at these file
locations (depending on your system) Do the same for the python folder.
- for manually compiled GCompris it would be : /usr/local/share/gcompris
- for GNU/Linux distribution : /usr/share/gcompris
- for windows : C:\Program Files\GCompris\share\gcompris
- for MacOSX : GCompris.app/Contents/Resources/share/gcompris
4. Now, go to your terminal and type 'gcompris --reread-menu' GCompris
should take several seconds to load all the activities.
5. Once it's loaded, click on the discovery activities (second from the top
on the left menu bar), then click on the Sound activities (has an ear). You
should see six new music activities! (A screenshot of what you should see
is located here: *http://mit.edu/bhadley/Public/new_sound_activities.png*
6. Now it's your turn. Play with the activities, have your kids enjoy them,
and send me feedback! I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions.

Thank you very much for your time, and if you have any questions, comments,
or ideas please contact me.
Enjoy!
-- 
*Beth Hadley*
bethmhadley at gmail.com