Karma and tinygames

[Bryan Berry]

Hi,

some of you may not know me so allow me to introduce myself. My name
is Bryan Berry and I have been working on the OLPC project full-time
for the last 4 years in Nepal. I co-founded OLE Nepal, the
organization which is implementing OLPC in Nepal. For the last 12
months, I have focused on Karma, a JavaScript framework for creating
simple lessons (tinygames) using HTML 5 and running in a browser.

I am very excited about Tinygames and I believe that it shares the
same goals as Karma. Greg and I have discussed integration and we both
support merging the Karma project with tinygames. In the next couple
weeks I plan to close the Karma mailing list and encourage its 40+
members to join the tinygames google group. I also encourage all Karma
enthusiasts to hang out #tinygames on irc.freenode.net

My understanding of those goals is as follows:
* small games written in JavaScript
* games run in the browser
* games run on a variety of devices, including smartphones and tablets
* super-fun
* aligned or can be aligned w/ learning objectives

Karma was focused on running small learning games within Sugar and in
the browser. I now feel that Karma needs to support multi-touch and
conform to form factors like the IPhone, android smartphones, and
iPads. I can't tell you how excited I was that 36 different android
tablets were shown off at Computex last week.

While I have been the technical lead that role has been taken over by
Peter Gijsels, who arrived in Kathmandu just last week. My personal
plans are somewhat complicated. I have worked full-time on OLPC for
the last three years essentially as a volunteer. I now need to earn
money in order to keep working in this space. Over the next month, I
plan to add touch support to several Karma games and create IPhone and
Android apps and sell them on the respective app stores. My ideal
working scenario would be to sell games on the app stores and
contribute back gamecode and tooling to the tinygames community. It
will take me some time to figure out how to best monetize working on
open-source educational software. That said, the widespread use of
liberal licenses like the BSD or MIT licenses by the tinygames
community would help people like me tremendously.

My great hope for this list is that we use direct user feedback and
web analytics to guide us rather than our own assumptions or the
opinions of education academics.

I have much more to say but it can wait for future e-mails ;)

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

Thanks Bryan. I feel obliged to say that tinygames was largely
inspired in the first place by Bryan's work on Karma, and I hope that
we can create a strong community with a broad reach.

--g