After a long period of absence due to looking for a permanent position I will be adding to this blog on at least a weekly basis since I will no longer have to be gone on weekends searching for housing in different areas of the country. A Job finally opened up in my local area due to some mergers of several small companies with much larger conglomerations that infused some cash into these small companies.

My first entry will be a tetris like game with some twists that make playing the game interesting. Alizarin Tetris is a not a tetris clone since it has multi-player support, user-extensible color, shape and sound styles, can use TCP/IP networking and features a few different AI opponents. The only problem is that there is currently not a Windows(TM) binary available. So only Debian Linux, and BeOS binaries are available. When I first used this app a few months back there was a Windows(TM) binary but now that binary has been taken down. More on this later.

This next app is call “Little Wizard” , and is hosted on SourceForge a humongous repository for Open Source applications. This app is not going to be for everyone since this is really an “environment” in which a child can learn to program. Quoted From the web site ” Little Wizard is a development environment for children. It is intended to be used by primary school children to learn about the main elements of real computer languages. Using only the mouse, children can explore programming concepts such as variables, expressions, loops, conditions, and logical blocks. Every element of the language is represented by an intuitive icon, making it easy to learn. Little Wizard works under Linux and Windows 2000/XP.”

So you can see that this is really a tool for little people to actually start learning about logical steps taken in the process of teaching a computer to operate a series of operations that we developers call a program. This reminds me when I bought my 5-6 year old son the “Winnie Pooh” playhouse, and the program went through a program step called first things first. Which was meant to teach a small child how to order operations to achieve a desired result. In the case of the Winne Pooh Disk, there was of course Tiger talking to the child on the screen and leading the child through the various operations. This “Little Wizard” has none of that interaction or leading from a funny character like Tiger, and so a child will have to be more self motivated. But the program can teach things like Addition, Subtraction, multiplication, Division and grouping operations. Since my boy is now 15, I have no young child to test this program on, so I have not tested the app except to be sure that the installer does not cause harm to my Windows XP pro system.

[tags]microface,Open Source, Games[/tags]