Learn from Map Application.

[Ashish Totla]

Hi,
I am a 3rd year B.Tech student at DA-IICT (Dhirubhai Ambani College of Information and Communication Technology), Gandhinagar, India. I am an Android and Windows phone Application Developer by passion and have developed an Android Application using Google Maps API v2 to help users set to-do alarms based on locations and won 2nd prize for that in i.Fest organized by IEEE -Link for the source code :- My Android Applications. I have also worked on WiFi P2p API to connect Android phones wirelessly and facilitate communication between them without using any Internet Connection. Currently, I am working on socket programming to facilitate the above stated objective as the WiFi P2p API needs Android 4.0 and above to work.
I am interested in working for the "Learn From Map" Application as I have worked with Google Maps quite well and long enough (1 year). I would like to add some of my own features to this App, such as:

1. We will have a StartScreen or the Hello Screen as the App launches which will display a map and will enable the player to choose his/her region to quiz for by simply zooming in or out the map. Also, the player can select a difficulty level to match his/her IQ.
2. For the first time when the player plays the game, our App will learn his/her score and then based on that will do some computation and ask the player to change his/her 'level' to match their IQ better. This will accomplish usage of AI in our Application. We will simply do the computation based on the score and the questions answered correctly and then accordingly will make the decision.
3. Thirdly, if we can set up a server for our Application from where we can fetch the questions (which is not very difficult, we can simply make put our questions categorized by different difficulty levels on that server and can make our App fetch data from there by creating an HTML client and then parsing the Jason object thus received), we can make users compete online with other users which will motivate them more and more to play and hence learn a lot more.
4. We can make options available to players that whether they want to play online and compete with other players or they simply want to play locally competing with their own high scores. Playing online means our server will send the same questions to all the payers currently online and then will fetch their scores and sort them and rank them and will display the leader-board.
5. We will work on UI inorder to make the App more Appealing and user friendly. Like we can simply make the player to touch/drag/click on the displayed map to answer the questions.   
6. We can keep Daily Challenges like complete a specific number of countries/regions for the players to make our App more appealing.

And hence, we can add many such more features and make our Application a lot user friendly and an excellent learning Application.

Looking forward for a quick response from mentor(s).

P.S: Regrets for the delay in my post.

[Pankaj Nathani]

Hi Ashish

Thanks for your interest. It seems that you have understood the application.

 

3. Thirdly, if we can set up a server for our Application from where we can fetch the questions (which is not very difficult, we can simply make put our questions categorized by different difficulty levels on that server and can make our App fetch data from there by creating an HTML client and then parsing the Jason object thus received), we can make users compete online with other users which will motivate them more and more to play and hence learn a lot more.

For the scope of GSoC we are not looking to setup a server side implementation. Instead, please use a bundled XML format to store meta-data and semantics related to geographical regions. Also, the multiplayer option may not be a feature that we'd like to implement as we don't have a server side implementation.

 

5. We will work on UI inorder to make the App more Appealing and user friendly. Like we can simply make the player to touch/drag/click on the displayed map to answer the questions.   

Sure, map interactions make this game.

 

6. We can keep Daily Challenges like complete a specific number of countries/regions for the players to make our App more appealing.

Yes, this has been suggested by many students.

I would suggest you to submit a proposal to google melange if you are interested to apply for this project. 

[Ashish Totla]

Hi Pankaj,

Thanks a ton for the quick reply.

Regarding the multi player scheme, I would like to add that we can facilitate multi player gaming by simply connecting devices wirelessly using WiFi P2p API or socket programming and then exchange data and create the Leader-Board (I am currently working on connecting devices wirelessly and have actually made a chat application which uses NO INTERNET CONNECTION, for other details, you may see my github that I have mentioned above.). This won't need any Internet Connection. Only one user has to be the Router (Make his/her device a Hotspot to which all the other players will be connected to). This can make the job really easier and hence need for Internet and Server will be eliminated.

May I know that whether adding Business plan to our App is preferable or not.

Yes, I am ON my proposal and will submit the same as soon as possible. Thanks for the support.

[Pankaj Nathani]

Hi Ashish

 

Regarding the multi player scheme, I would like to add that we can facilitate multi player gaming by simply connecting devices wirelessly using WiFi P2p API or socket programming and then exchange data and create the Leader-Board (I am currently working on connecting devices wirelessly and have actually made a chat application which uses NO INTERNET CONNECTION, for other details, you may see my github that I have mentioned above.). This won't need any Internet Connection.

Ok, however 'multiplayer mode' is something that we are not very keen on for the GSoC version. 

 

May I know that whether adding Business plan to our App is preferable or not.

Well, this is the free and open source software world, we don't require a business plan since we're not doing any business :)