Non EQ related

[Laleldil]

Long ago I fiddled a bit with Visual Basic 6. I created a game of concentration. The game was simple, but it had a couple of groups of tiles that could be used. I would like one that is more adaptable to what I would like to do and I have long since lost my simple VB6 program.

I would like an selectable grid at the beginning. Say 20 tiles, equating to 10 pictures, to say 60 tiles or so. I imagine once the process of selecting the number of tiles is created, the progarming to do 20 tiles or 40 or 60 or 100 tiles would be similar, just the numbers used in the formulas would change. Obviously the number of pictures would be half the number of tiles, since they need to be in pairs. Then the hard part for me was to get them randomly mixed on the grid. Clicking the image of the back of the tiles loaded the front image which had to equal the front image of the next selected tile. Actually it worked in reverse, since the second tile's front image had to equal the first tiles front image. If equal then tiles removed, if not equal then tiles reverted back to back images. That was pretty much as far as I had gotten.

I did not understand some aspects of getting images from folder location, so I had to keep the images in the program and make two programs when I wanted a second set of front images.

My entire desire is to be able to create folders of the correct size images to be used as front images. Say one set would be tree leaves, or dog breeds, or insects, or flowers, or birds, etc. I would then say have a picture of a Beagle with the image having Beagle on it. When the other Beagle is found, the kid starts to learn that a beagle is a beagle and not a dachshound. As desires grow, similar to when I was in college and needed to be able to recognize one kind of salmon from another, or a teal from a mallard, the groups of pictures can become more complicated. Yet the game aspect is still fun for one who likes concentration.

The final aspect would be the most challenging for the player, and programme too I assume. The front image of one pair would be just the name and the front image of the match would be the leaf, bug, mammal, or whatever you are studying. So the pairing would be say OAK LEAF and a picture of an oak leaf.

I would like the program to be able to select the images from a created folder. Not necessarily created by the game, but accessible by the game when you choose which subject you are learning.

The general process would be then once the game is first started is to choose the catagory (folder) of images.
Next examine the folder to determine the number of images that are available, thus the number of pairs available, thus the possible range of the grid for the concentration. For the most difficult level of learning where you are matching a name with a picture, obviously then you have either two images that are to be considered alike, presumably by names recognisible by the program. Obviously the person originally setting up the folder and images would have to follow the strict naming and size requirements for the game to be able to take the pictures and work with them. Or if someone was really good at programing, have a setup portion of the game that can go through the pictures in a folder then save the pictures to the game's own folders in the format needed and ask for the text name that would be used for the hardest level.

I imagine if one knew how to work with grids and tables the process is easier to work with.

Well that was the general idea of how I had wanted my program to work. Thus a 6 year old, playing the game of concentration, could easily learn many concepts. Even such things as the word twelve and the number 12 could be used as a match. Or 2x3 and 6 could be used. So whether you are learning your numbers and letters, or harder content like names of books to authors or the ability to differentiate a sparrow from a tufted tit mouse, the game can be made as easy or hard, since all the program needs is to either have pairs of pictures to get tagged as alike or have an image it uses twice.

[Laleldil]

If I understand and new how to use a database, it would seem once the files count was done in the directory and the grid size was decided upon. (Say you had 60 pictures of bugs and you only wanted a 10x5 grid which would equal the use of 50 tiles so 25 images.) It would seem like you could have the program load at random 25 images from that folder into a database. Using identical images, one would only need then to use A1 twice. If using non identical images, say a text for name, you would use two databases with 1A1 being the image and 2A1 being the text.

Anyway that was where I got hung up a few years ago because I could not figure out how to look into a folder, do a file count, then take files out of a folder and put them in a database, then use the data base numbers to do the compares. But I had hopes of using the background as a reward or another puzzle being revealed such as in the old game of concentration.

Were it a more global program, once a concentration part was finished either on time or number of tries, it could even start a similar aged program that could be run for a set amount of minutes. It would then give warning, save game that is reward, then require successfull completion of the next concentration to be able to continue play in the reward game.

Were this done slick enough, it might be marketable. Perhaps one you out there is rich and don't know it yet.

[Laleldil]

A variant of this, that would use basically the same programing, could be used to learn the capitals of states or countries.

Divide the screen into quadrants.

Bottom left would have a grid of circles, probably named buttons that might start out as blue when nothing happening, then when clicked would be filled with say orange color, if correct would be filled with the backround color so it disappears or gets filled back in with blue if the answer was wrong.

Clicking one of the buttons, would require the program to display a picture in the upper left quadrant. Say you were doing capitals and states, this might be a landmark of that particular capital.

On the bottom right quadrant you would have a similar set of buttons that are treated like the other set of buttons on the lower left, but these would display overlays over lays of state outline and a line, or other animation. Part of the 'dressing' for that might be a pop up picture symbolic of the state.

Were you really inventive you could create gifs for a center 'being' similar to that paper clip of windows.

One gif representing him ready. One perhaps of impatience. One reacting to the events of the upper left, such as projecting the capital picture. One perhaps shooting a dart at the picture of the map for the state. One for happiness when it is a correct guess and one for sadness when it is wrong.

You could complicate the concentration game by having a timer, which is displayed on the screen. A correct guess bumps the timer to give a few seconds more time. When and if the timer resets, it does a rescramble of the existing tiles. Thus where you remembered a picture was, it probably is no longer there after a scramble.

You could use a scoring method. Say a tile is worth 50 points. If it is turned up it is still 50 points. But if it gets turned back over, it is now 49 points. A lucky guess of two corrects would give a score of 100. But perhaps another set had one tile turned over 10 times, it has now lost 9 points, remember it is the turning back over that costs the point. It would not be 10 until it was turned back over, which would also be the number of points it would value when it gets turned back up later. And its mate tile was turned over 16 times, it has now lost 15 points. That pair then had lost 24 points total which makes the pair worth 76 points.

The score could them accumulate over the course of games to get a big enough score to allow a longer time period of the reward.

Sigh if I could get laid off and sent back to school to learn this stuff, I'd have a blast.

[Laleldil]

Not only would this allow learning various things like states and capitals, or countries and capitals. It could teach relationship geography, like Montana being more northwest so not in the southeast, or Hungary being westish of England but eastish of Korea. But all the while, the concentration portion is forcing not only to know that knowledge, but exercising the ability to remember short term as to where in the grids the answers lie.

[Noircogi]

Are there any good technical book stores in your area? We have several in Silicon Valley as you migh guess. You could go browse them and find a few books for home study which would be helpful. If not, there's always amazon.com.

[Marmie]

VB = memories of "Let i = 1" Until I learned the Prof. MacDonald naming conventions...

[Laleldil]

Since I may be needing to do some homestudy, Is there a better language and assembler that would lend itself to this?

[Noircogi]

The vast majority of professional SW development (especially for non-database or web apps) is done in C or C++.

You used to be able to get VS2005 for free from MS just for watching some training videos here:
http://www.learn2asp.net/Campaign.aspx

I got a copy last fall that way.

It looks like it may have been downgraded to a download-only version. In my case they shipped me a big box of stuff.

I believe you can directly get the express version of Visual C++ here for free also:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/expre ... fault.aspx