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

Sat Aug 25 22:44:54 UTC 2012

Hello Beth,

I forgot to mention:

I tested with
 >
http://web.mit.edu/bhadley/Public/beth_hadley_music_activities.tar.gz
   last modified: 20-Aug-2012, 22:32

Regards,
	Peter

On 26.08.2012 00:36, Peter Albrecht wrote:
> 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!
> 
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