Let the games begin!

First a little bit about myself.

I'm Samitha Priyanath Jayathilaka, a Computer Science and Engineering undergraduate from University of Moratuwa. Currently I am in my final year. I love everything about programming. Recently I've developed an interest in Android development. It is developing applications for Android devices. I find this development so natural and easy, it feels like almost playing a game.

Google Summer of Code 2012

Google holds a annual program called "Google Summer of Code" in the times of April to August. This program enables students from around the world to get in contact with an Open Source organization and voluntarily do a project for that particular organization.
The program is being held this year too (2012). I applied to participate in this years program doing a project for Catroid.

Catroid
http://code.google.com/p/catroid/
Catroid is a application that helps Android users to create user programs using a "visual programming language". This is mainly targeted for kids and it is inspired by Scratch. The application is still in the beta stages and there is a great potential for the application to develop.

I have tried Catroid to develop some of my own animations/games and I personally found it very entertaining and highly usable. This is an application with a bright future. These Catroid projects can be downloaded for use in the following address.
http://www.catroid.org/catroid/index/1

The Project
I found out about Catroid from the GSoC organizations list. I liked the idea of the project on the get go. There were a list of ideas provided by Catroid in their project wiki. I got interested in the idea of replacing the XML serializer used by Catroid to save and load project. Having worked a bit with XML handling before and seeing how inportant this is to the functioning of the whole app I decided to apply with this project. And I got selected to carry on with the project!