Today was the final day of our three weeks internship at TU München. We finished our project phase by giving a presentation which was filmed by Mrs Demmel. She helped us really a lot and spent a lot of time on taping our presentation and will also is going to edit it afterwards.
This presentation is in our oppinion a good way to finish our project phase. We were reviewing the whole process of our work and also created a website which makes it just possible to improve the activity weMakeWords for the OLPC in future. Finally we also have two proper working versions of our activity: of course the one for the OLPC and also the kind of necessary windows version. So we are very happy to have such a round and well-ordered result.
We are going to expand and improve our activity in future, too. But news will not longer be posted at this blog-website. Instead every further changes are reported on our project site
http://sites.google.com/site/wemakewordsolpc/.
In nearer future, to be precise tomorrow, we are going to leave Munich. Looking back at these three weeks we spent here we can say that it was a really great time. Lots of experiences, many impressions, talks with many people we met ment both a very interesting and enriching internship and also a very enjoyable stay at the heart of Bavaria.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Friday, May 7, 2010
Thu, 6th May - Lots of documentation
Today we spent our whole time on creating materials which document our project and our work on it. On the one hand we wrote a summary (in two versions, one shorter and one longer) and created a presentation about our experiences during the internship. On the other hand we created a project site at google sites: http://sites.google.com/site/wemakewordsolpc/, wrote a tutorial which actually describes our way to make an activity work in very detail (http://codingforolpc.blogspot.com/p/guide.html) and are going to place our source codes at google code. Hopefully someone in future uses our materials and is therefore able to create his own activity. Also these steps are necessary to make a continuation of programming in future just possible. Also our coaches are involved in our project site so that we can continue our cooperation.
Tomorrow we are going to continue documentation (UML diagram, some content for our new web page, etc.) and we will do our final presentation tomorrow. We are a little bit excited about it but hope that each part of our presentation just works well.
Tomorrow we are going to continue documentation (UML diagram, some content for our new web page, etc.) and we will do our final presentation tomorrow. We are a little bit excited about it but hope that each part of our presentation just works well.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Wed, 5th May - beta - release
Today we finished the development part of our project. Finally we created two seperate running versions: One for windows platform, one for the OLPC.
During the last 24 hours we spent a lot of energy on adding some nice features, some animations and of course creating nice graphics. This took some time but we guess paid out. Thanks to a lot of people who published pictures they have taken under the Creative Commons License we were able to find a few quite beautiful ones and put them together for our activity. Following the license we mention the names of all authors of pictures on our startup screen.
Today's coding was rather relaxed. After managing a portation of the almost complete project we were able to repeat this procedure today and get everything to work.
In the final phase which we actually entered today we try to finish everything and bring it to a proper end.
So we are going to spend next two days completely on documentation. On friday we will finish our three weeks at TUM with a special highlight. We are going to present our results during a video taping session. So afterwards we will receive a short video featuring us and our project - and of course the XO.
Also there are few more tasks to fullfill - such as: creating presentations, writing documentation - probably a tutorial for other OLPC developers or people who are interested in this subject, updating UML diagram, adding (more) comments to source code and ... .
So all in all we are looking forward to our video taping session and are still working on the finalization of our program.
During the last 24 hours we spent a lot of energy on adding some nice features, some animations and of course creating nice graphics. This took some time but we guess paid out. Thanks to a lot of people who published pictures they have taken under the Creative Commons License we were able to find a few quite beautiful ones and put them together for our activity. Following the license we mention the names of all authors of pictures on our startup screen.
Today's coding was rather relaxed. After managing a portation of the almost complete project we were able to repeat this procedure today and get everything to work.
In the final phase which we actually entered today we try to finish everything and bring it to a proper end.
So we are going to spend next two days completely on documentation. On friday we will finish our three weeks at TUM with a special highlight. We are going to present our results during a video taping session. So afterwards we will receive a short video featuring us and our project - and of course the XO.
Also there are few more tasks to fullfill - such as: creating presentations, writing documentation - probably a tutorial for other OLPC developers or people who are interested in this subject, updating UML diagram, adding (more) comments to source code and ... .
So all in all we are looking forward to our video taping session and are still working on the finalization of our program.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Tue, 4th May - Really Running
Today we managed actually two portations. First we made our program run on the emulator and later on on the real XO. During this we experienced that the resolution of the XO is much higher than we thought. It seems that we have to change few things a little to solve this problem. At the moment we are very busy performing all changes, adding some animations (for example an animation for a finished symbol) and searching for nice pictures which are published under the Creative Commons License.
Tomorrow will be our last day of development. Thursday and friday will be spent on presentation and documentation. So we try to do our best and push the ongoing of the project as far as possible. Hopefully we will get something to work!
Tomorrow will be our last day of development. Thursday and friday will be spent on presentation and documentation. So we try to do our best and push the ongoing of the project as far as possible. Hopefully we will get something to work!
Monday, May 3, 2010
Mo, 3rd May - presentation and continuation
Today we spent our time on two different aspects. On the one hand we presented the progress of our project. On the other hand we worked hard trying to get our already on windows working (!) version working on the OLPC.
This morning we visited together with Mr Haeussler, our teacher for computer science, Mrs Matthes and had a little chat about the ongoing of our project. Afterwards we presented the current state of our project and talked about opportunities to continue it.
But what is exactly the current state of our project? Since last week our project has experienced a lot of changes and improvement. All of our classes are working properly together. User interface exists and is completely usable. Also Bots are added which interact with the player. Symbols and strokes of which they are consisting are dynamically loaded according to a txt-file - our dictionary "database".
So right now our next task is to get all this existing stuff working on the XO. Today we started doing this - and already experienced some problems concerning namespaces. But by now it seems that we found a possibility to solve this problem and are looking forward to get it done.
In best case we would be able to present at the end of this week three different versions: Singleplayer - non-XO, Singleplayer - XO and Multiplayer - XO. In worst case we should have at least the windows version working. Friday we will see what we managed to create - probably somehow an average case :-).
This morning we visited together with Mr Haeussler, our teacher for computer science, Mrs Matthes and had a little chat about the ongoing of our project. Afterwards we presented the current state of our project and talked about opportunities to continue it.
But what is exactly the current state of our project? Since last week our project has experienced a lot of changes and improvement. All of our classes are working properly together. User interface exists and is completely usable. Also Bots are added which interact with the player. Symbols and strokes of which they are consisting are dynamically loaded according to a txt-file - our dictionary "database".
So right now our next task is to get all this existing stuff working on the XO. Today we started doing this - and already experienced some problems concerning namespaces. But by now it seems that we found a possibility to solve this problem and are looking forward to get it done.
In best case we would be able to present at the end of this week three different versions: Singleplayer - non-XO, Singleplayer - XO and Multiplayer - XO. In worst case we should have at least the windows version working. Friday we will see what we managed to create - probably somehow an average case :-).
Friday, April 30, 2010
Fri, 30th
Today we reached very much, which you can also really see. We connected all of our classes and nearly have the menu ready. Our game screen is ready and you can already place some strokes on a demo symbol.
Right now, everything seems to work the way we want it and we are really looking forward to finish the stand-alone-version very soon.
One of the problems we had during the last days - that instances of the same class using an attribute always used all together the same memory address, which means that the value of the attribute changes for all instances when you change it for one - has been solved by simply not writing the attribute in the usual place for attributes in the class definition, but declaring it in the constructor so that it is created with the instance and only for this instance.
We also used events for the first time so that we can now scan the input for the important signals and e.g. show new buttons when a first button was clicked.
Happy is the right word to describe how we feel about today's and this week's work.
Right now, everything seems to work the way we want it and we are really looking forward to finish the stand-alone-version very soon.
One of the problems we had during the last days - that instances of the same class using an attribute always used all together the same memory address, which means that the value of the attribute changes for all instances when you change it for one - has been solved by simply not writing the attribute in the usual place for attributes in the class definition, but declaring it in the constructor so that it is created with the instance and only for this instance.
We also used events for the first time so that we can now scan the input for the important signals and e.g. show new buttons when a first button was clicked.
Happy is the right word to describe how we feel about today's and this week's work.
Thu, 30th April - Busy
First of all: We have been very busy today. On the one hand we continued our project and workend intensively on the implementation of our classes. On the other hand we participated in the lecture EIST held by professor Brügge and were engaged in the ice-breaking challenge of the "iPhone-Praktikum".
Let's start taking a closer look at our project. We are still working on the stand-alone-version for windows. Mainly because of two reasons: First, both of our laptops came as common with installed windows OS so it has become our development platform. Second, if the portation to the OLPC would fail, we also had another version which works. This would be a slightly better result of our project phase than having no clue what to do get just anything working.
Our current target is to get the windows version working. Then we are going to do some necessary changes according to the special features of the OLPC. Then we will test our activity in the simulator and afterwards on a real XO. We really hope that our activity will at this moment work. Because debugging on the XO can become really difficult because the only feedback we get from it is wether the activity starts or not. That is so far our roadmap for the OLPC coding.
EIST lecture in the morning was interesting and covered aspects which are helpfull for our project, too. Especially for the documentation of our program using UML.
The icebreaking challenge of the "iPhone-Praktikum" started at half past three in the afternoon. Its target was as usual for icebreakers a better team bonding. Today every team had to build a tower out of paper, balloons and some other stuff. Afterwards their towers were judged in different categories such as height, beauty and weight which can be placed on the top of them before they break down. Our job was to help the organization staff as good as possible. After the awards show our day ended enjoying some BBQ.
Let's start taking a closer look at our project. We are still working on the stand-alone-version for windows. Mainly because of two reasons: First, both of our laptops came as common with installed windows OS so it has become our development platform. Second, if the portation to the OLPC would fail, we also had another version which works. This would be a slightly better result of our project phase than having no clue what to do get just anything working.
Our current target is to get the windows version working. Then we are going to do some necessary changes according to the special features of the OLPC. Then we will test our activity in the simulator and afterwards on a real XO. We really hope that our activity will at this moment work. Because debugging on the XO can become really difficult because the only feedback we get from it is wether the activity starts or not. That is so far our roadmap for the OLPC coding.
EIST lecture in the morning was interesting and covered aspects which are helpfull for our project, too. Especially for the documentation of our program using UML.
The icebreaking challenge of the "iPhone-Praktikum" started at half past three in the afternoon. Its target was as usual for icebreakers a better team bonding. Today every team had to build a tower out of paper, balloons and some other stuff. Afterwards their towers were judged in different categories such as height, beauty and weight which can be placed on the top of them before they break down. Our job was to help the organization staff as good as possible. After the awards show our day ended enjoying some BBQ.
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