Lead Programmer: Mitchell May

One of the main goals of the OLPC program is to encourage collaboration and interaction through the activities. One way that this is accomplished is with a technology called the mesh. The mesh allows the laptops to communicate with each other even if they aren’t connected to the internet. We decided to implement a mesh-collaboration by creating a graphing activity.

The reason we decided on this was that when we went to visit the teachers in Winona, MO they stressed that it was really important to start teaching graphing in the first grade. My first step was to talk with one of the education professors on campus and talk to her about what types of graphs 1st grade students can understand. She told me that the only types of charts that students can understand at that age are tally charts. Armed with this knowledge I created a graphing activity that allows the students to share their food diaries over the mesh and compare them with each others. As you can see from the screen shot below, the student’s most recent food diary is displayed on the left side of the screen while the average of the rest of the class’s food diaries is displayed on the right hand side. This chart allows the students to count how many of each category they have eaten and see how that compares to everyone else. It is a really simple way for them to realize that maybe they have eaten too many fats and sweets or not enough vegetables.

The other piece that I worked on was a 2-player mode for our game. This component also helps to teach students collaborative skills. The original plan for the 2-player mode was to have two students be able to play on two separate laptops that communicated over the mesh. After testing this idea a little bit I realized that it was unrealistic to transmit every move a player makes over the mesh. Since this option didn’t work, we decided to create a 2-player mode where both students can play together on one laptop. The objective of this is that two players can work together to overcome obstacles and assist each other in making it through the levels. Certain rewards and goals will only be obtainable if two players work together. An example of this would be a trophy that can only be reached if one player stands on the other’s shoulders and then jumps.

That's it for the collaboration pieces of Healthy Mario. Thank you for reading our blog. Keep checking back for more updates on Healthy Mario!