Talk:Educational content ideas

Please help us to better organize the wiki for educators to use. Currently, there is an overbalanced amount of technical content because a lot of hardware and software is underway. But the OLPC is not a project to create a cheap Linux laptop and will be a TOTAL AND UTTER FAILURE if that is what comes out of it.

For the OLPC to succeed as an education project, it needs top quality educational content. This is a major challenge since the world is currently awash in mediocre educational content in digital form. Someone has to sort out the gems that already exist. This may require licencing negotiations.

However, as an open source project we expect that we can harness the efforts of many people to create some truly innovative educational content. Stuff like MATLAB for kids (Squeak's Etoys come close to this).

wixi

http://wixi.cc can offer a free (libre) kid-powered multilingual learning exchange.. wixi could format twext translations on stable wiki resources ie songs, sayings, quotes, etc

wixi links would love to be published on this wiki

content from the Sharing your content with OLPC page

ideas, cut & pasted, to be merged in with this page.

Stories

• The International Children's Digital Library (1000 books in a few languages, mainly English)
• Logos children's library
  • Aesop, Grimm, Anderson
  • Cultural works and epics : Homer, Edas

Reference works

• Logos childrens' dictionary

Interesting Data Sets

Miscfiles

http://directory.fsf.org/GNU/miscfiles.html

(Or localized alternatives)

• connectives (prepositions, pronouns, and the like)
• web2- Webster's Second International English wordlist
• web2a- Webster's Second Internations appendix english wordlist
• propernames- some common proper names
• airport- list of three letter codes for some major airports
• birthtoken- traditional stone and flower for each month
• inter.phone- international country telephone codes
• cities.dat- geographic coordinates of many major cities
• postal.codes- postal codes for US and Mexican states and
• languages- two-letter codes for languages, from ISO 639
• currency- currency abbreviations and names
• countries- country abbreviations and names and capital cities
• jargon.html- The Jargon file (same as the _Hacker's_Dictionary_)
• us-constitution- The Constitution of the United States of America
• us-declaration- The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies

Project Gutenberg Data

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/8

Dictionaries

List of Words in Spanish

http://www.datsi.fi.upm.es/~coes/espell_leame/espell_leame.html

Grady Ward's dictionaries:

• Moby Hyphenation List (English), http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3204
• Moby Multiple Language Lists of Common Words (English), http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3206
• Moby Part of Speech List (English), http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3203
• Moby Pronunciation List (English), http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3205
• Moby Thesaurus List (English), http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3202
• Moby Word Lists (English), http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3201

• The Logos multilingual dictionary, a GFDL dictionary in 200+ languages.
• The Indic Family of Languages project

  I am thrilled by this project. I make available my multi-lingual comparative dictionary for over 25 ancient languages with hundreds of thousands of words for use on the laptop. I also offer this to google for use since google supports the one laptop per child project. Congratulations, Nicholas Negroponte and his team for initiating this project. Best wishes for a successful launch.

  -- S. kalyanaraman, Ph.d. Sarasvati Research Centre, Srinagar Colony, Chennai 600015 kalyan97 at gmail.com

• African Language Bilingual (with English) Dictionaries - Hausa, Akan, Ewe (West Africa)- from kasahorow.com

Encyclopedias and Almanacs

• Wikipedia (and subsets of it)
  • The Wikipedia Schools CD (2006 articles)
  • The One encyclopedia per child project to design a concise snapshot of Wikipedia content
• Other encyclopedia projects...

Atlases and Maps

• The 2006 CIA World Factbook is a superb atlas and reference document for statistics of every country in the world. It also includes appendices of International Organizations and Groups, Selected International Environmental Agreements, Weights and Measures, and more. The Zip file of its contents (including GIF but not PDF maps) is only 18.8 MB, and should compress a bit smaller using a bzip2 or 7zip. It is public domain.

Texts and instructional material

Including illustrations -- graphs, charts, diagrams, maps, &c.

Music and Mathematics

Logo Challenges

• Logo Challenges. I created this set of Logo challenges. Maybe the project will find it valuable.

Algebra 1 in Simple English is a project in two parts

• At OLPC_-_Algebra_1_in_Simple_English/ we are developing content, asking algebra teachers to contribute
  • problems and exercises,
  • tutorial example problems
  • test questions
  • vocabulary in simple english
  • and links to practice games.
• At www.HSTutorials.net/ we're developing the student-user interface. We want to have the finished content on another site that is not a wiki, since having your math book change while you're in the middle of a problem set would NOT be helpful.

As of yet unnamed Logo book

• I am working on an enhanced ebook about programming and math using Logo. It is not being written in a wiki way, but it will soon be possible for OLPC participants and the public to offer feedback during the writing process. It is about half completed, and the first draft will be online shortly. Lethe

Language learning

Reading, spelling, writing; reading comprehension, from alphabets to serious textual analysis. Including sounds, and images -- pronunciations, songs with lyrics, fonts. Also including: first languages, second and further languages, advanced language : literature and poetry.

I am the autor of a specialized "manual" for the 1. year of studies of French as Second Foreign language. It has only 7.5 Mb, is written in HTML, with some 60 photos. I would like to join that to the OLPC. The manual is divided in 4 modules, each modules is made of 4 lessons, each lesson divided in 6 parts: lecture, foreign expressions, questions, grammar, exercices and documents. There should be 4 manuals (one for each year) - I am now working on the second one. The modules are for this first book: 1/ L'aérotrain, 2/ Les scanners, 3/ La photographie numérique, 4/ L'électricité (with a last part named: "Paris, Ville Lumiere") Sincerily yours: Horváth-Militicsi Attila, prof. agrégé Narodnog fronta 77/III 21000 NOVI SAD Serbia Email: 6hunyadi@eunet.yu

Other Science and Humanities

Wikijunior Project

Images

General

• Images from old books all copyright free
• Wikimedia Commons - 500,000 freely licensed images, sound, and video files
• drawings of the human body for non-language based basic medical information - eg. human figure holding stomach looking sick

Also including : Photographs of the world, images of people, other works of art, sketches, diagrams, blueprints.

Media

Recordings, compositions, from Nature, &c; Video from the world; of performances; animations

Software and more

General education

• GCompris educational software package : I am the author of the education software GCompris (for children from 2 to 10). In fact, many activities are useful for first users whatever their age. Of course, GCompris is free software released under the GPL. It is developed and maintained by a small community. I would like to know if GCompris makes sense for the OLPC project. If so, I will make the effort to adapt it in order to suit the OLPC platform.

  I wish the best to your project. Regards, Bruno Coudoin

• Take a look at the project OLPCities
• Please take a look at http://www.stellarium.org/. Stellarium is a free open source planetarium.

Laptop as flexible physical object (ruler, etc)

• ruler (something like [1], but better adapted to the screen)
• graph paper (something like [2])
• protractor
• theodolite/astrolabe
  • "eye on edge of screen" - lines converge to eye point off edge of laptop.
  • "held out at known distance" - like [3]. Even at child arm's length, something like 10 minute precision might be possible.
  • Is there no way to get something more like a sextant?
• medical - images/software to do self testing
  • vision
    • visual acuity tests (Snellen chart, E chart, near-test card, gratings, etc).
    • visual field tests (Amsler grid, perimetry testing, tangent screen test, ...?)
    • color vision tests
  • hearing (audiometry, including visual reinforcement and conditioned play; discrimination (though some tests are language specific))
• color reference

Even if the screens are not color calibrated at manufacture, perhaps a couple of laptops camera-ing their own screens and cases could self-calibrate.

• color determination - screen lighting plus camera

Hmm...

What else does a computer controled light source get you?

Can the touchpad be somehow used for weight determination?

Any chance of using the speakers/mic for echo-based distance measurement?

A common theme here is that with so very many similar/identical laptops, one can do things normally intractable due to computer diversity. 66.30.117.127 05:25, 7 January 2007 (EST)

Colection of Ideas for Projects the kids can do with the XO

It would be usefull to have a colection of Ideas and Tutorials for projects that kids could do with their XO's, involving the entire set of default activities that ship with the XO.

As an example, at Squeakland's website you can find tutorials for Etoys projects. Of course other Projects would envolve using other activities, and more than one for each project if necessary.

It would be a sort of Starting guide to the Constructionist way of learning by doing.

Some people are taking steps in this, see Educational bundle as part of each release and Towards Collaborative Constructionism.

HoboPrimate 14:49, 24 June 2007 (EDT)