When Life Gives You Lemons...

As the A-Team searched for ways to contribute to the Sugar Labs FOSS project in the last few weeks we stumbled across a delightful activity called Lemonade Stand.  This is a math/microfinance related game where the user runs a lemonade stand.  It challenges students to perform quick and accurate money math, work with ratios, manage their budgets to maximize profit, and even provides some "real world" situations that may be harmful or beneficial to the success of the lemonade stand. 

We had some trouble running the program at first because the check-out and build instructions embedded a folder an extra level.  Correcting these build instructions is actually our first idea for what we can contribute to this project! 

We also ran into some problems trying to figure out how to play the game!  We couldn't find any instructions on the wiki or in the game for what the goal was or how to take any action.  Since the GUI does not include a mouse we were able to deduce that the game is played via keystrokes, but which keys?  Through about 20-30 minutes of trial and error ("does this key do anything? or this key combination?") we were able to figure out basic game play and it was actually really fun!  Adding some instructions to both the wiki and the GUI is a second idea for contributions. 

I was personally intrigued by the random "real world" events.  A few examples that we ran across include lemon trucks crashing near the lemonade stand (gives you free lemons), a sugar salesman stopping by to give you some free samples, and ants stealing some of your supplies!  In 30 minutes of play time, I had ants steal my supplies multiple times and expressed to my teammates that I needed to relocate!  To my surprise, this is actually one of the requested features that has not yet been implemented.  I'm interested in playing with it, but I think my teammates also have a lot of other ways we can contribute which we are sure to be able to complete in our time frame.

Overall, I am really excited about Lemonade Stand.  I think it has great potential as a Sugar activity and is actually something I'd love to share with my sister, who teaches fourth grade!  I still have a lot of exploring to do into the inner workings of the game, but that should be fun, too!