Digital photography basics on GCompris

A GSOC 2012 Proposal for GNOME

Abstract

The goal of this proposal is to develop a camera based educational activity toolkit

that extends GCompris, for kids between age group (2-10).

“ Give a Child the Gift of Photography And You Give a Child a Key that Can

Open New Doors to Creative Expression, New Perspectives, Confidence, Artistic

Achievement, & FUN ”

Motivation

Camera and Photography have always been fascinating for me and I wanted to do

much more with them.

When I visited nearby rural areas in Rajasthan, India to train kids to use OLPC

laptops , at that time making them familiar with GCompris fascinated me and drew

my attention to develop some activities related with camera to teach kids.

Being kids lover, photographer and open source enthusiast. This project would let

me combine all and Will help kids to learn as well.

Proposal Activity set:

a) Know your camera Introduction

know the parts and working of camera

CamPuzzle

b) Primary Light Colors Color Description (Primary, Secondary and White light)

Identify colors (as Primary, Secondary and White light)

Add color to get desired color

c) Image filters Play with Different Filters

Use Filters to get expected result

Revert back the color

d) Optics

e) Take a shoot

f) Camera Simulator

GCompris Camera Activities:

A GCompris extension, that has following set of activities:

a) Know your camera

It will include the textual description of various parts of a camera and a level at the

end to assemble various parts of camera in form of puzzles. Kids will click on each

part of camera in the initial levels and will be explained its functionality in text /

audio format. It will be categorized further as:

Introduction

know the parts and working of camera

Cam-Puzzle

b) Primary Light Colors

In this Activity at the initial level there will be description about primary and

secondary light colors and formation of white light color with colors. Different

level of activities will be based on color selection, desired color formation, Kids

will be asked to form secondary color with mixing primary color. Further

classifications are as follows:

Color Description (Primary, Secondary and White light)

Identify colors (as Primary, Secondary and White light)

Add color to get desired color

c) Image filters

In the set of Image filters activity image filters will be presented to kids and letting

them play with them and adjust brightness, saturation, hue, etc. In this activity, at

the end a level will be kept to make it more interactive where all filters will be

combined together and kids will be asked to adjust different filters and produce

expected results in a specific image as bringing back tux to blue color and

increasing / decreasing its brightness etc. Also number of modes will be equivalent

to number of levels in this activity as shown in the mockups below. Classifications

are as follows:

Play with Different Filters

Use Filters to get expected result

Revert back the color

d) Optics

In this activity we will teach kids about lens, magnification, how light ray passes

through the lens but yes keeping it in mind the range of kids for GCompris is 2-10 ,

here activity will be emphasize on on close / far and big / small (zoom in / out )

effects as observed from camera lens. In this activity kids can learn how light rays

coming from object through camera lens in form of animations. Kids will be able

to change the position of lens and observe the effects.

e) Take a shoot

In this activity we'll teach kid how to grab a picture holding a camera. We'll assign

them a task mentioning different focal points and they'll be asked to capture them

.Also a viewfinder will be provided on the screen as shown. The difficulty of level

will vary on the number of objects in the Picture. Also in this set of this Activity

Kids will learn about Identifying objects.

f) Camera Simulator

In this Activity, we will teach kid to interact with basic features of camera via

simulator. In the initial levels of this activity there will be explanation of each one

of them lightning, aperture, focal length, aperture ISO , etc individually and at the

end of the level we will show them altogether and ask kids to modify image using

all the functionality. See [1]

Implementation:

Getting insight into interaction between GCompris core and activity

plugins.

Create menus in xml formats for each activity including all important

information & fields related with activity.

Designing the User interface with PyGoocanvas to implement the

canvas widgets & PyGTK for creating the GUI.

Use GIMP for icon skins etc.

Use PIL (Python Imaging Library) for image filters activity. [2]

Developing algorithms for each game activity.

Integrating algorithms with the code.

To get started with sample code of pythontest & pythontemplate

activities.

Timeline:

April 23 - may 21:

-Further discuss the activity ideas with the mentor

-Getting familiar with PyGoocanvas, and GCompris API.

-Getting familiar with the Gcompris development workflow.

-Setting up the development environment.

-Study the overview of game sequence & interaction between

GCompris core & activity plugin.

-Contact people who've worked on Gcompris in the past, learn from their

experiences.

Phase-1: May 22 - June 4:

Start Coding

User Interface Design for the activities : Introduction and Know your Camera,

Code integration of activity plugin with the UI.

Documentation

Phase-2: June 5 - June 18:

Designing UI for Primary Light Colors activity and its different levels,

Code Integration and Documentation

Phase-3: June 19 - July 2:

Designing UI for Image Filters and its different levels of Activity.

Use of Python Imaging Library

Code Integration and Documentation

Phase-4: July 3 - July 9:

Designing UI for Optics Activity

Mid-term evaluation:

Three Activities will be Showable: know Your Camera, Primary Light Colors and

Image Filters Activity with documentation.

Phase-5: July 10 - July 16:

Code Integration and Documentation for Optics Activity

Phase-6: July 17 - July 30:

UI design for Take a shoot activity and its different level.

Code integration and Documentation

Phase-7: July 31 - August 13:

UI design for Camera Simulator activity with its different levels.

Code Integration and Documentation

August 14 - August 20:

Extensive Testing, Documentation & Debugging.

Code cleaning.

Final Release.

Student:

Name: Vivek Anand

Email: anand.vivek13@gmail.com

Blog URL: http://insidevivek.wordpress.com/

Github: https://github.com/insidevivek

Timezone: +530 GMT

Location: Bangalore, India

I am Vivek Anand currently pursuing engineering in Information Technology from

Govt. Engineering College Bikaner, Rajasthan Technical University.

I am passionate about Interaction design, Open Source software and hardware. I

used to work on a multi-touch table [3] [4] with my college mates. My blog details

[5] [6]. Apart, I am an open source enthusiast and active member of Linux user

group at my college [7]. I have been using Linux since past 3 years where

GNOME is the preferred desktop environment on it.

- I am well versed with photography and basic principles/concepts of optics.

- I love to code in C, C++, Python, PHP, Java and JavaScript, I have worked on

joomla twitter module, Drupal module to auto tag users, python django application

to implement feedback app. Code can be found here [8]

Since I am already well-versed in the community interactions/dynamics of OSS

projects, I will have absolutely no trouble in mingling with the community and

working with the infrastructure (Forums; Version Systems etc.). I have submitted

bug report (#672964)

I have participated in some intercollegiate technical festivals, fetched my team

First Prize at IIT Kanpur and BITS Pilani’s technical festival, where I exhibited

our multi-touch table with Applications and demonstrated how to make a PyMT

application from scratch.

On the other side I have organized couple of events including Software Freedom

Day [9], Annual FOSS Summits “RajasFOSS”.

Also I have been associated with Spoken-tutorial, an initiative of “Talk to a

Teacher” project of the National Mission on Education by Govt. of India.

References:

Python Imaging Library: http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/

PyGoocanvas: https://live.gnome.org/PyGoocanvas

PyGTK: GTK+ for Python: http://www.pygtk.org/

GCompris: http://gcompris.net

GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/

Links:

[1]. http://camerasim.com/camera-simulator/

[2]. http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/

[3]. http://vimeo.com/2953423

[4]. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UCQfgysLO9o

[5]. http://insidevivek.wordpress.com/

[6]. http://anandvivek.in/

[7]. http://lugb.in/

[8]. https://github.com/insidevivek

[9]. http://lugb.in/sfd