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

Sat Aug 25 22:36:41 UTC 2012

Hello Beth,

I finally found time to install your gcompris activities.
Your acitivities are really great! It makes fun, to play
around with them.  ;)

A few ideas, that came to my mind, while playing with them:

** Explore Farm Animals / Explore World Music **

1) Maybe you should set the answers-click-items more apart
from the regular text. It is hard to identify them, when you
are a new user. Perhaps empty radio buttons? Or a light
yellow rectangle (with round corners) around earch answer?

2) When the user answers a question correctly, a smily
appears. Then, this smily disappears and the screens looks
identically to the screen, before the user clicked on an
answer. I would expect the clicked answer to be highligthed
"correct" (= green) or "false" (= red). (Perhaps the yellow
rectangle, mentioned above, would change its color.)
Or you use the medal from the main screen, to identify the
correct given answer. And a red "x" for wrong answers.

3) BUG: My linux is configured to German language. Visiting
the "cows", I get the question:
  "How many compartments does a cow's stomach have?"
and four answers in German language:
  "Fünf" (=5), "Vier" (=4), "Eins" (=1), "Zwei" (=2)
I guess, this activity is not translated completely to
German. That's no problem.
But I can't give the correct answer! According to wikipedia,
I would say "Vier" (=4) is correct. But whatever answer, I
click, I always see a sad smily. :(

Same problem with the "cats".

4) Your bonus smily has no sound. Sounds are fun! :)
You could borrow:
"/boards/sounds/bonus.wav".

** Piano Composition **

1) Safety question before erase:
Typing notes might take several minutes, but there are some
buttons, which erase them in 0.01 seconds. ;)
Perhaps erasing the notes should precede a question like
"Are you sure, you want to delete all your notes?".

2) Piano key marker:
While playing a melody, a yellow spark jumps from note to
note on the right side. So the user always knows, which note
is currently played. Maybe a similar symbol should be used
on the piano keys on the left side. So the user can look at
those and associate the sound she/he hears with the
corresponding piano key.

** Name that Note! **

1) The bonus does not have a sound. Maybe you could play a
row of about three short notes, which make up a happy or sad
melody.

** Play Piano! **

1) "Attempt" is not visible:
The melody, the user plays on the piano, is recorded and the
user can erase it, if she/he thinks, she/he was wrong. But
this is somewhat invisible. The user has to imagine: "There
is something recorded in the computers RAM"
It would be easier to understand, if you would show the
attempt, which was entered by the user, on the screen.
Perhaps you print the current row of entered piano key
letters next to the piano keys. E.g.: C C F G

2) GCompris: Repeat question:
The GCompris interface provides a way to the user, to
"repeat the current question". This is a button (two green
arrows bend to a circle) in the GCompris bar. You set it with:
 # gcompris.bar_set(gcompris.BAR_LEVEL|gcompris.BAR_REPEAT)

Maybe you want to add this, to provide a user interface
homogeneous to other activities.

** Play Rhythm! **

This realy is the most difficult activity of your six. This
is the only one, that made me read the manual. ;)

1) BUG?: No auto level increase:
After replay the two rythms of level one correctly (got a
green note ;)), the level is not increased to "two"
automatically. Instead, the first rythm is displayed again.
Is this intended? I would prefer the level to increment
automatically.

2) Quick appear of the scrolling vertical line:
Using the scrolling vertical line, as suggested in the
manual, is quite difficult. Since it abruptly appears at the
first note. In this moment, the user has to play the drum,
which requires very quick reaction. (Or am I too tired? ;)
It would be way easier, if one could see the scrolling
vertical bar, a little bit before it hits the first note.

3) BUG: "Play" button needs double click:
If the user wants to hear the rythm again, she/he sometimes
has to click on the play button twice.
The first click stops the scrolling vertical line from
starting a new "run over the notes". And the second click
starts the replay. Whatever time I wait between two clicks.
And after replaying the sound, the scrolling vertical line,
does not come again. :(

4) BUG: No drum-sound while metronome:
If I start the metronome, playing the drum does not make a
sound any more. Disabling the metronome again, brings back
drum-sound at click/"space".

5) GCompris: Repeat question:
See "Play Piano!" 2)

6) "Attempt" is not visible:
See "Play Piano!" 1)
My suggestion would be, to add little dots below the eraser.
One dot for every drum beat clicked by the user.

I hope, this amount and type of feedback is ok.
Having written all this, I realized, this is a veeeery long
email. Perhaps I should use the bug tracker next time?
Beth, what do you prefer?

Regards,
	Peter

On 18.08.2012 07:03, Beth Hadley wrote:
> 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!