Posts

GSoC ends!

Hello all, Google Summer of Code 2017 has come to an end. In this due time, I evolved as a student pursuing a Bachelor of Commerce who can also do programming. Mind Math activity is in its last stages of development. A detailed report on the activity is available in its repository, here . I express my sincere gratitude to Tony Anderson, who mentored me throughout the project and helped me to overcome many odds. I had a huge sense of fear being a newbie to initiate a communication on a topic during the initial days. But Tony has helped a lot in this case and initiated conversation many times and also took much time in providing me with the feedback on the work. [Drafting...]

Challenging the calculator

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Hello all, In the last week, I was working on the calculator challenge part of the activity. As you might have seen the developments, with the latest activity the user will be able to get to know a trick, learn it and keep practising it. So what's next? As they learn and improve, they shall become capable of challenging a calculator and compete with it. On posing a question, the user and the calculator will compete to answer. In a calculator, the time taken to enter the question on screen is accounted while a user can do math by his/her mind. Within a given time, the user has to answer the question or our friend, Tux using the calculator will win. It gets interesting if we are able to answer the questions faster than a calculator does. A screenshot showing the challenge. The code needs to be merged and a quick cleanup is pending. I shall update the game url once I complete that. Game link: [To be updated] Repository link: https://github.com/SanjayKumarr/M

Why do the tricks work?!

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Hello all, It's been some time posting my updates here. With learning the tricks to solve the problems quickly,  the mentors suggested that it would be better if we can help the learner to understand the actual math behind the trick. That will help them to learn and explore more. Taking the valuable suggestions, a new part called "curiosity clicks" has been added to the activity. Let that evolve in time in this weeks, but before getting to that, we will see the math behind few math tricks we saw in the last post. 1) Square of a number just below 100. 2) Multiply any number with 5. 3) Multiply any number with 9. 4) Multiply any number with 11. 5) Square of any number ending with 5. 6) Square of any number just above 100. You may please test the being developed activity here and also the code repository here .

Test the Vedic math tricks

In this post, we shall go through few tricks that you can learn here and test yourself in the being developed game. The learning suite will be merged with the game very soon. It is still being developed. Trick 01 : Square of numbers just below 100 Let us find (x) 2 . X is just below 100. Step 01: Find the difference between 100 and this number. Step 02: Now, Subtract the difference from the number (x). Step 03: Find x 2 Answer = Step 02 | Step 03 Example: Question: (96) 2 Step 01: Difference is 4 (100 - 96 = 4) Step 02: 96 - 4 = 92 Step 03: (4) 2 = 16 Answer = 92 16 Trick 02 : Square of numbers just above 100 Let us find (Y) 2 . Y is just above 100. Step 01: Find the difference between the number and 100. Step 02: Now, Add the difference to the number (y). Step 03: Find y 2 . Add Answer = Step 02 | Step 03 Example: Question: (104) 2 Step 01: Difference is 4 (104 - 100 = 4) Step 02: 104 + 4 = 108 Step 03: (4) 2 = 16 Answer = 108 16 Trick 03 : Multiply a number by 9

Tell me the square of 65 in 5 seconds!

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Hello, As we make progress, we have our first game in place. The concept of the first game is explained below. Trick 01 : Square of any number ending with 5 Let us find the square of the any number ending with 5. Say x5. Step 01: Think of the number next to x.  Step 02: x * number next to x  Step 03: Put 25 at the end of the answer  Answer = Step 02 | 25 = x * ( x + 1) | 25  Example: Question: (45) 2 Step 01: Next number to 4 is 5 Step 02: 4 * 5 = 20 Step 03: Put 25 at the end of the answer Answer = 20 25 Implementing this game wasn't not our prime concern. We were more involved in defining a framework to implement as many tricks as we can. In that attempt, we have developed our first game. The learning was huge. Being the first one to be developed, we had overcome many difficulties and and also learned a lot. Few screenshots of the game are as follows, Initial menu screen Game screen Following this post, a short tutorial on developing

Starting with Phaser and game states management

Hey, After the community bonding period, I have started to put my hands on developing games and are in my initial stages.As I have mentioned before, being from a Non-CS background, Its been a little struggle in the beginning to make one. With the advantages of Phaser as mentioned in the last post, I was able to make progress steadily. Though I haven't completed my first game, I hope with the learnings so far I shall be able to make one before the next week. I have committed to the community to show them the prototype by June 12, 2017. I have tried out the examples and was making the mock-up screens for the game. From the learnt best practices, using states allows us to break our game up into smaller pieces that can handle different mechanics of the game. So for now, I have created five states that will function as follows, The Boot State - To start the physics system and then call the load state. The Load State - To load our assets and then show them the initial game loadi

A beginner, choosing Phaser as the game framework!

Hello! While I got an opportunity to develop games under Google Summer of Code '17 under Sugar Labs, I looked into many HTML5 and JS frameworks. A curated list of JS frameworks by GitHub can be found here . To filter them out, the following are the available 2D game frameworks, Phaser.io Phaser is an open-source JavaScript framework for writing 2D games. It uses Canvas or WebGL if available. Pixi.js Pixi.js is a rendering library to create beautiful digital content with the fastest, most flexible 2D WebGL renderer. CoCos2D-HTML5 Cocos2d-html5 is a cross-platform 2D game engine written in JavaScript, based on Cocos2d-X and licensed under MIT. And a few more. I have considered the following points to choose a framework. 1) The framework is OpenSource. [Most of the chosen ones are!] 2) It has an active community and has an active forum with answers for the frequently asked queries. 3) A well written guide or tutorials to develop games using it. 4) This point h