As you know I was working on musical activities and wrote about note names in my previous blog post. The gtk+ version of GCompris had the following musical activities:
- Note names
- Piano composition
- Play piano
- Play rhythm
My aim was to work on note names and piano composition and those are the most basic activies kids need to learn. A child should learn note names first to have a good understanding of note position and naming convention. Then the activity piano composition should be played to have the knowledge of musical notation and musical staff, then comes the play piano activity which explains how the piano keyboard can play music as written on musical staff and then the rhythms are learnt on the basis of what they see and hear in play rhythm. In the last two weeks I worked on completing Note names which you can test in my branch note names.
I also worked on piano composition in which I worked on the following things:
- Added the components including playing of music on staff, changing note length to quarter, whole, half, eight note, change of clef to bass or treble.
- I also added the initial load button for loading melodies and worked on save button for saving the melodies.
The saving of notes is still in progress where we will save the melodies to ~/.local/share/GCompris/piano_composition in the form of .json which user can load and delete. - Improved the vertical layout of piano composition.
In the last month I also worked on polishing the overall house animation for oware and also added the score animation. Though the score animation is yet to be polished to make it more user friendly for kids. Overall this was a musical month for me where I enjoyed working on musical activities (listening to notes and melodies like Twinkle Twinkle little star refreshed my childhood memories). There was also an emergency in my area and curfew was imposed for 72 hours and we had no internet access during that period :( But now everything is back on track. The 3 official months of our working comes to an end but well that’s the start of a journey in itself of helping new contributors to be a part of our family and help them in the best way we can. I hope that our experience and reviews can help them produce clean and factored code :) At the end it should not be just workable code but clean and maintainable to make it easy for future contributors to read and make changes :) I would work on the remaining things and features and polishing my activities in the coming time and would cover the whole GSoC period in my next blog :)