The Pensieve

If you have kids who are into schooling, now would be the time when you are revising their knowledge for the upcoming mid-term and half-yearly exams. A good way to check up on your kid's (and your) math skills is to setup up a question paper. Unfortunately, kids have good memory power that you can't reuse the same maths question paper. Otherwise, you would see them breeze through the QP as they tend to 'remember' most of the answers. The alternative is to have multiple QPs. But that is a pain and I had been thinking of coming up with a simple script or software (TeX) to generate the QP dynamically. The final solution was much simpler. Use Excel or Open-office Calc (in my case) to dynamically generate the question paper. The key is, for each of the question, have a bunch of random numbers (to your specifications) generated so that you can construct the parts required for your sum and generate multiple versions of the question paper by recalculating the workbook.

Ever since I had seen GCompris , a children activity application, I always wanted to add modules that caters to the need of getting my son to learn while he plays games. GCompris supports a python interface for rapid board development. But one quip that I had was, GCompris is a Linux only application (though they have a commercial win32 port). Now, if I can find a framework that works both on the Linux as well as the windows platform, it would make great sense. Gcompris as of now only will restrict schools to the Linux OS (which is good, but most schools would probably be using Windows and getting them to change would prove difficult) would be good. An alternative framework would be Java with it's great 2D API (no fancy 3D here to confuse the kids). Others would by SDL with C/C++ or pygame (which I read has performance issues on the windows front. Read childsplay ). A new contender that I noticed was the Mono framework which sports a 2D API identical to the DotNet framework. My im...