Now the Fun Begins

My team (Flux Capacitors) has been considering working on a new activity for Sugar Labs as our project for the rest of the semester.  We decided to each tackle the Hello World tutorial on the Sugar wiki to see if we thought this was a realistic goal.  For the most part, we were all successful and decided to move forward on our plans for the project.

Our activity will help to teach children about having a balanced diet by eating appropriate servings of food each day from the different food groups.  The activity will be a daily journal they can keep that will tell them how healthy their combination of foods was, and make suggestions of what they can eat that will help them score higher.  To begin with, there will be simple drop-down menus to choose the different foods they ate during the day.  The algorithm will analyze their combination of food servings and come up with a score (probably between 1 and 100).  A "health-o-meter" (or some other meter) will display the score for their entries.  We hope to make the meter fun with sounds, graphics, and/or comments.

The activity will also give some suggestions about what other food groups they should include in their diet to make a higher score.  It will also tell them why that food group is important and how it can improve their health.

We've come up with several of the main tasks that we will need to complete, especially at the beginning of this project.  We plan to use an SQLite database to keep track of all of the different foods and their groups.  We have also learned that the graphics for Sugar activities should be in SVG format, and they recommend using Inkscape.  This is another new tool that we will have to invest a little time in learning.  Since we're also designing the activity, we'll have to research the different food groups and the recommended servings so we can come up with a good algorithm for determining the daily score.  Once we get to the point that our activity is working in Python, we'll need to "sugarize" the project using the Sugar libraries and commit it to the Git repository.  (Initially, I assume we'll just keep our project on the 462playground in the CIRDLES server using Subversion.)

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Status of the Android App

I've finished working through most of the tutorials on the Android Developers' site.  I met with my friend (my "client") who has the idea for the app, and we came up with a simple plan for the first version of the app.  I've drawn some simple diagrams of the classes I'll need for the app (only 3 for right now) and the layouts for the input and output screens (only 2 for now).  I've realized that I need a little more info about how this app should work.  My plan is to email some different input scenarios to my friend so he can let me know what his desired output would be.  This will help me to better design the algorithm/query.

I'm somewhat familiar with writing SQL statements to query the database (SQLite for this app), but I am learning how to interact with the database using Java (specifically, how to use the data in the queries in my program).  I've started coding a little bit.  I re-used some of the database helper code from the tutorials that I think will apply to this app.  I've also started coding some of the GUI, based on other tutorials on the Android site.  I bought an Android App Development book that has a lot of information about layouts that should be helpful.