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I can't be the only one with kids playing Ryzom, trying to make the best of it for their development?
In fact we got started playing to encourage my son to write: He just never had any reason to practice IRL.
For now I'm just happy to see him typing away coordinating with team mates, but I'm starting to see a lot of learning potential beyond basic literacy and numeracy
(and we haven't even left Silan! https://xkcd.com/152/ )


Here are just a few of my initial mini-lesson ideas, if there's any interest I'll keep adding more and report on how they pan out with my kids.
I'd be delighted to hear from others too!
Feel free to share and redistribute, please include a reference to this forum so we'll have a common place for everyone to contribute.


Fractions: You can't see other people's exact HP, just how much is lost relative to their maximum. You can however guess it fairly well by observing what fraction of their health you restore with one heal spell. How many spells would it take you to heal them from 0 HP? Multiply that with the number of HPs you restore at a time (if it scrolls by too fast look at the "sys info" window) and that's roughly their max HP.

Percentages: Try not to start with probability even though that's what is in your face the most. There's speed factor and protections (percentage of damage absorbed) in the Identity window. Try to work through examples they might have heard: 100%, 50%, 0%, 1% (very little) 99% (almost all). Can the percentage be more than 100? Try the speed spell :-) Can it be negative? I could imagine cursed jewellery that doubles magic damage to you, that's -100% damage absorbed.

Units: There are conventional units of distance and time all over the place, but also game-specific quantities like health, sap and experience with their respective units HP, sap (yes, life is cruel, and language is not run by physicists...) and XP. Some things are the same quantities looked at differently, so they can be measured with the same units: width and length, but also health and damage. Units can be combined for derived units: calculate the DPS (Damage per seconds) of your weapons! Right-click->info provides damage/hits and hits/minutes.

Cardinal directions: The game uses real-life directions and the map is shown North-up. The compass can be set to point to North. Try to print the map, and find your way around without using the in-game map window! You'll notice you'll have to keep track of where you are, and use visual markers visible from a distance like the column of smoke from the camp or the throne room hills.

Distance, speed: You can set a compass target on the map, and see your distance from it. Find a suitably open area and run straight towards your target. Note the time it took and the difference in distance (the distance traveled.) Calculate the speed you run in km/s. Calculate the speed you walk. Try in heavy armor and overburdened backpack.
Try to change the stanzas in an attack spell to minimize casting time and maximize distance. Attack from as far as you can. Can you land two hits on a fat bodoc before it covers the distance? Three? How about a nimble Yubo? What does that tell you about their speeds?

Angles: Not directly visualized, but prospection has an angle you can increase as you level up. How many times do you have to prospect to cover the full circle around yourself with 90 degree prospection? 45 degrees? 1?

Sounds great! Welcome to Atyss :))

Wonder what milage there is in introducing crafting skills - different mats produce different stats - some tell me it is about maths ...

Welcome to you and your son!

I'm not a parent or teacher, but reading this post made me happy. It's great to see kids to learn useful and interesting stuff and having fun with it too!

I'll add a few (probably obvious) ideas since I'm not sure what else to say, take them with a grain of salt since I'm not an educator and don't spend much time around kids at the moment:

* This isn't a math or writing topic, but Ryzom is full of people who speak different languages, if language learning is something that interests you guys right now.

* Tiling/space filling: I don't think this is one of those traditional topics they teach kids, but it might be interesting. Questions: If I want to make sure I've explored this whole area with my prospecting cone (defined by my prospecting angle and range), how can I optimally do that? (And how is this made messy by "real life" implementation, for example if there's a tree where I was supposed to stand?)

* Finding things the mathematically correct way: I don't know what to call this since (sadly!) I never properly learned this skill(yet!). I feel like there's a "right way" to find a location in these circumstances: 1) The deposit tracking skill reports distance to a specific point: I really should only need two different measures of "distance to the point" to determine it's location, shouldn't I? That's how stereo vision, hearing, etc work, I'm told. 2) This might also be done with prospecting ("you find some matching materials nearby"), but this is less precise. I'm not a kid, but if you develop this lesson you can share it with me too. :)

* Map-making/surveying skills might be something you could do here too, in line with the previous idea. You could draw your own map. That seems like a bigger project but maybe a simple map with a few features would be enough to get familiar with the skills involved.

* I'd also like to mention that Ryzom is open source and also welcomes contributions. It's possible to look under the hood as it were, to make your own version of this game with modifications, to contribute back, and to help create things in this world that you want to have exist. This stuff might or might not interest you guys.

* Lastly, let us know if you'd like us to send you our Ryzom Science questions for consideration :) For example, my current one is "How is the _amount your death penalty would have been reduced_ related to _the experience you would have gained if not under death penalty_ ?" I'm not sure whether these would be boring or interesting to try to figure out, but you might get a few good questions to explore.

Thanks for the feedback, guys!

The deposit tracking is my favorite :-)
Yes, two distance measurements taken sufficiently far away from each other should let you narrow it down to 2 patches:
Imagine drawing a circle around yourself with the reported radius. The deposit is somewhere along that circle.
Move aside, do the same thing again: The two circles will intersect at two points, one of which is the deposit.

We can either sketch actual circles on a piece of paper, or take advantage of the "Law of cosines", calculate the angle, turn that much, and start walking right towards the source.


Yes, I'd love to hear those science questions! Sounds like something you'd have to set up experiments for, look at results, draft theories, verify with more experiments. Just perfect, especially if relevant for gameplay and thus genuinely interesting to my students :-)

Thanks for explaining how the two distance measurements work! I know I'm not your target audience but it's nice to understand it a bit better too :)

Here's a Ryzom question I have lately that might or might not be good for a science type lesson. It's certainly something that's easy for me to develop superstitions about.

Question: Do any landscape features (trees, bushes, flowers, certain kinds of terrain) indicate the presence of resources? (For example, you might think wood is easily found near trees, or something like that.)

This might be too broad a question, but you could narrow it down ("Do trees indicate the presence of wood resource in this particular island?") Although, narrowing the question might itself be a useful exercise.