[GCompris-devel] Preparing release 0.50

[Holger Kaelberer]

Hi

On 18.10.2015 14:31, Bruno Coudoin wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Some more feedback on the activity itself. The levels are nice but the
> difficulty is too steep. We could just include more levels of close
> difficulty to make it less steep.

Yes, I am aware of that and will integrate other levels before merging.

>
> We could also make it appropriate for smaller children. In fact this
> kind of activity is mostly interesting for fine motor skill. So the
> increasing numbering is less important, we have other more appropriate
> activities for this.

To my experience the motor aspect of the activity is more difficult than expected for children, 
especially with holes. With the current acceleration sensitivity children (lets say <10) really need 
to train the fine movements to not make the ball always 'overshoot' again and again in every 
direction. Currently I'd guess that the target age is >=5 years min., even more for the more 
difficult levels.

>
> So I suggest to make some changes, instead of numbers to catch in
> orders, let's make a catch the stars in any order. This way any children
> can play it, even with no reading skills.

Interesting suggestion. As said I agree that the difficulty level is pretty high atm. I'll put 
non-numbered contacts/buttons/items on the todo-list for future improvements, should be pretty easy 
to implement by adding another item-type.

I thought more about making the controlling of the ball easier to handle for smaller children maybe 
by making the tilting-to-acceleration sensitivity and inertia (? german Trägheit) configurable via a 
slider. This might even be more important for smaller devices, with a 10' tablet you have (at least 
subjectively) more control. The optimal values are really hard to settle ...!

Thanks,
   Holger