I was bemused to find that some kids can play our initial arithmetic activities ("3 + 5 = ?") all day long without learning what I’d like them to learn, which is to do arithmetic quickly in their heads. That’s because there’s a successful playing strategy that doesn’t exercise this path in your brain: slowly and patiently count each sum on your fingers and then give the correct answer. To my surprise this is exactly what some kids do, and on reflection I see that the activity doesn’t present any reason not to. Ooops!

Today we rejigged one of the activities so that the player will hopefully tend to become faster and more accurate by playing. The revised gameplay is this: Each question has a time-limit, you have to correctly answer a bunch of questions in a row to proceed to the next level, and with each new level the time limit shrinks by one second. This means that the tempo of the game increases as you play until you reach your limit and can’t struggle on to the next level.

The adults have found this quite fun to play — I found that my heartrate pumped up when I had only 2-3 seconds to answer questions. It will be interesting to take this to the kids and see how they react

We’re also now starting to feel that we’re ready to expand from working directly with friendly kids to working with friendly teachers who have classes of their own. My hope is that they can make a lot of these "obvious" observations for us about where the activities succeed and fail with real Nepali kids.

Onward we go..

If you want to test your arithmetic aptitute on the activity then here’s the steps:

1. Install a recent version of OLPC Etoys.
2. Scale the screen to match XO size using the square button on the toolbar at the top of the screen.
3. Drag’n'drop OLE-24.st (Smalltalk code library) into the Squeak window, choose ‘fileIn entire file’.
4. Drag’n'drop the AddingUpto10Fun project into the Squeak window.

I’ve left the Etoys scripts visible in flaps at the bottom in case you want to tinker!