Welcome!

[Jeffery Douglas Waddell <jeff@smluc.org>]

Hello all,

Welcome to the Kids Games mailing list!

Well, I've been answering alot of email, I hope I've responded to everyone
so far, If not I apologize.

Thank you to Thomas Hudson, Chris Ellec, and Doug Loss, for jumping in and
getting the conversations going.

I think it is a good idea to introduce yourself to the list and what you
see as your role in all this is.

If you hadn't already guessed my name is Jeff Waddell, and I started this
whole thing with a little post to LinuxToday.com.  I'm the Founder,
current President, and a current Board Member of the Southern Missouri
Linux User's Club, and you already know my oppinion on Kids Games for
Linux.  I see myself as the coordinator of this project, tying the strings
together and lending leadership to the myriad directions we will need to
go to get the job done.  I also intend to contribute code as well as
content.  So let's get down to business shall we....


First off, we already have the mailing list, however the mailing list is
not archived, because I'm not sure what I'm supposed to install to do it.
Any pointers of what software to get, install and configure is welcome.

Second we are setting up CVS servers as we speak, however there is not
much to go into them yet as our code is practically nil.  This will change
quickly I hope.

Third, I'm currently working on several changes to the website at
http://www.smluc.org/SIA/kidsgames/ in order to make it the home of this
project.

Ok now, let's get the difficult stuff started.  I'm going to try to put my
vision of what we are trying to do into words so that we can work from it.

First we are creating BASELINE eductional software, so this means we are
trying to create minimal basic standard applications across ALL
educational needs.  To me this means basic math, language (english for me,
other may see other languages as basic), history, and science.  I think we
should concentrate on skillsets as opposed to grade levels.  Once the
baseline is in place we can EXPAND it to cover ANYTHING our hearts desire.

We will need content, and we will need an engine to display/use that
content.  Since we have a minimum of 4 areas of content, I'm asking for
volunteers to spearhead each of these areas of content:

	Basic Math
	Language
	History
	Science

I'll have more to say about gathering content in a separate post.

We will need to create what I call a kids game builder application.  I'm
willing to spearhead that for the moment.  If we can get 1) a content
format figured out and delivered to our content providers, we will be able
to plug in new content and generate new games easily 2) if we make the
"plugin" interface well, it will be able to deliver gpl, or non gpl
content without difficulty.  I suggest we examine xanadu, xml, and the
gimp plugin model to see if any of these things can be of use to us.
I will continue this discussion in another thread.

We have had several people suggest a kid's desktop and I think this is a
worthy goal, I think it can be simply a THEME in the Enlightment
windowmanager's set of themes, or failing that it's own window manager.
If there is someone with theme experience I encourage them to step up to
the challenge and spearhead the Kid's Desktop sub project.

If we give the kids a "safe" place to explore they will Learn more and the
will remember it longer.

At the same time that we are creating a standard I think it would be nice
to go ahead and create simple applications to do some kids activities as
QUICKLY as we possible can for several reasons.  1) to hone our skills 2)
to get more and more people excited and interested 3) to get applications
into the hands of parents and educators.  Some of these applications may
be absorbed and or abandoned along the way, however I think we should
still do some of them, just because there is such a dry wasteland out
there right now.

Right, this is long enough, I'll continue my thoughts in separate emails
on the things mentioned above.

Sincerely,

Jeff Waddell
jeff@smluc.org


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