This is a brief list of possible ideas for the HFOSS Curriculum project, where the students team up and attempt to create and educational game for students grade 4 and under using an XO laptop.

Go here for now!

COMMARCH TEAM PROPOSAL

So for my HFOSS course, we were given XO laptops. I’m not sure why yet, but it sure is cool.

The first assignment is to perform a smoke test to check all the features for bugs or breaks. After going through what I could, all the hardware seems functional. Without another XO to communicate with some tests are impossible, but I have no reason to believe its broken. Can’t wait to see what we do with this thing. I don’t have a laptop myself since the Macbook Air my uncle gave has made a full conversion into nothing more than an aluminum frisbee, so I can probably find some uses for it myself.

Experience taxonomy writeup here

Premise: Using an arduino, build a simple interactive machine that utilizes a minimum of three sensors. My project idea was to create a character with two RGB LEDs for eyes. The sensors I used were a ultrasonic rangefinder, accelerometer, a bluetooth radio, and a potentiometer (just to dim the LEDs).

I have just gotten done sending in my first patch to an open-source project and man am I relieved. Looking at this goal a week ago I thought it would be fun, but the more I thought about it and the more I tried to do this the more daunting the task became. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but the full weight of the task didn’t hit me until I realized that even once I found a project (one I understood in a language I knew), I would have to build a programmer’s map in my head detailed enough to find a file causing a given bug and any associated files that might be affected by changes. And that had me terrified. Debugging code can already be a challenge, but picking up someone else’s project, especially a project that could have been accumulating code for years, would require learning everything that the project does as you search for where a problem could be. It was not something I thought could be well done in a week.