End-user application software

Software Ideas

End-user Application-level Software

Graphing Calculator

A Graphing Calculator software should be added as well as these devices are quite costly and not widely available. An example would be the TVH-72g Graphing Calculator for mobile phones, see One Graphing Calculator Per Student

VOIP

Availability of a well-working SIP-based VOIP client on this device could prove popular (when when always-on connectivity and sufficient bandwidth is available through the set up of some satellite IP link in a remote region) Vorburger

Recording & Sending Voice Messages

Recording and subsequently listening to voice messages - this is not very big in "our" world, other than the voice mail on your phone; few people seem to record and attach voice messages to typed emails. But if you don't have phones at all, and no always-on for VOIP, maybe recording a voice clip and sending it could prove to be a popular usage - particularly for the parents of the kid that the laptop belongs to, who may be unable to read and write much?

Vorburger

Recording is VERY important - say in OGG format. The main application perhaps is taking 'Voice Notes in class. There is need for software to support Voice Note synchronized typed or handwritten (a pen interface is important in many settings, including education) text (typed), sketched and Webcam captured content - and thus capture the flow of information in a class and fuse it with student notes. This would define a new type of "Notebook". Students who missed class would find this invaluable. Should be possible to store Note books on a class or school sever and periodically burn them onto CD/DVD. L Pfeffer

Totally transparent gif files

The following web page has some totally transparent gif files available.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/spec0001.htm

The idea is that such a gif file may be included in a web page without disrupting the display, yet the ALT tag for the gif within an HTML page may include information useful to a speech synthesiser system. The totally transparent gif files could perhaps be helpful in making the content of web pages more easily accesible to students with visual problems.

William Overington

16 March 2006

-- is it not better to just use text on a webpage? -- ssam

Well, the idea is that the text included in the ALT tag would be information which would be obvious to a sighted user, yet which could be very helpful to a student with visual problems. For example, with the picture to the right. The picture could have an ordinary caption displayed on the web page. In addition, the ALT tag could include information such as the following. The image shows a styling design for a laptop computer. There is a base which includes a keyboard and in front of the keyboard a touchpad. Above the keyboard is a screen. The keyboard keys, the touchpad, the casing of the laptop and the casing of the screen are all light blue in colour.

A design for a laptop computer with keyboard and touchpad

Fonts

What sort of fonts is the laptop to use?

The Gentium font has support for lots of languages which use latin characters.

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=Gentium

The above page includes the following.

quote

Gentium is freely available and may be used by anyone at no cost. It is now released under the SIL Open Font License, a free and open source license that permits modification and redistribution. Our hope is that it will stimulate literature production and elevate extended Latin alphabets to greater parity with the basic Latin alphabet. We also hope it will encourage other type designers to appreciate and support those fascinating and beautiful extra letters.

end quote

William Overington

18 March 2006

Game Console Emulators

Make some Nintendo and Sega console emulators (NES, SNES, GG, MS), try to ask Nintendo and Sega if they agree to let you load onto the machine a selection of hundreds of the best console games from the 80'ies and 90'ies for the children to have fun with.

You could maybe even ask Nintendo and Sega join the OLPC as corporate members, they could provide their games, and provide upgraded wireless mesh-networking gameplay functionality for some of those games.

I have not seen, many educational games in Nintendo or Saga

I don´t believe it is a PC to play with, but a PC to LEARN with. I don´t see the the "what for" in the proposal. --Dagoflores 00:24, 4 April 2006 (EDT)

Obiouslly you have never played SESAME STREET COUNTING CAFE, an execllent game for saga, I actually played it far more than I care to admit. Educational games tend to have poor sales and little media attention so it is not suprising that you haven't heard of them. Futhermore even games that are not strictlly educational have value too, they can help kids develop abstract problem solving skills, pattern reconition, and the ability to experiment. And any ways what is wrong with letting kids have so fun? Or is that only allowed in first world countries. Lout april 5

Games

I totaly agree with Lout. My opinion about games : for learning physics and mathematics, some non educational games can be of a great interest. For example, the classical asteroid-like games : you need to control a spaceship moving in space, you can only rotate and add a pushing force in the forward direction (so, to stop you need to rotate 180 degrees, and add a force that will oppose the inertia). This kind of game can give the children a good feeling of Newton law of motion. They are many games of similar interest. An other advantage : when the children play, they will be more likely to try to make there one games, and that the best way to learn how to code (What the fun for a child in hacking or making an educational software ?) --Charlie

Focus should be put on creating games for linux not emulation

Emulation is not very efficient since it requires more space and CPU overhead than a program written for the native OS. By having developers creating new games and clones of existing games, no cost or licensing is required and a lot of the unnecessary bloat can be cut out leaving the core of the game, saving valuable space.

Also games don’t necessarily have to be educational. I’m not going to recommend putting a first person shooter on this laptop, but simple 2d games are a great way to pass time and have fun. Video games are a big part of technology, and I believe all children should be able to experience them. By including the source code of the games students can use it to help them program their own games.

Including both educational and popular 2d games played in our society can help get children excited about this technology and give them incentive to use the device to further their minds.--Rocke86

Video-On-Demand (torrent RSS aggregator)

For subscribing to feeds of video from the internet, as well as amoung students and teachers to be able to send videos to each other, and have all students be able to watch the latest recorded lessons, video-messages from the teacher, video-messages from other students (using a webcam).. There should be a Torrent RSS aggregator software like http://getdemocracy.com so users can browse a channel guide and they can download video from channels, and they can start their own channel and easilly publish videos to channels.

Video Conferencing

With a 10$ usb webcam add-on, the student attach it onto his 100$ laptop, that can be used with video conferencing software over mesh-WiFi and over the internet.

Instant/SMS Messaging

To buddies in the mesh.

Gaim Instant Messenger would probably be included, but a more advanced system, where you could maybe see everyone near you and chat with them would be cool.

(Reader Contribution) Multilingual Instant Messaging requires translation libraries; a u.s. government thinktank created a good approach that runs native and translated languages in parallel; I have a research license, happy to explore. todd at cftw dot net

Rotating Screen-Image

(Reader Contribution) I thought it would be nice if the screens of the laptops would have a way of rotating the image on the screen. For example, there might be a command you type on the keyboard (ctrl + right), that rotates the image displayed on the screen 90 degrees for each time you press ctrl + right. this adds the possibility of reading on the laptop, in e-book mode, similarly to a real book. This would allow one to see en entire page of text on the screen.

Midi player/composing software

Including a midi or similar engine would allow music to be stored in very small instrumental files and by including composing software using various instruments allow students to create music of their own with out worrying about running out of space.

The freeware Anvil studio is a good example of composing software http://www.anvilstudio.com/

A similar program with the bloat taken out would be a great musical education tool.

By including this engine it would allow games and programs to have sound effects and music while only adding a very tiny amount of data. I think it would be a cool idea to include a small library of various types of music in .mid or a similar format so that students can listen to music, open it in the composing software, and get excited about making their own.

Also .mid and .kar files can carry a text channel allowing the device to act as a karaoke machine, fun ;). This could be quite useful for teaching language and other educational material. These formats are very compact; often a file of only 10 kilobytes can produce a full minute of music depending on simplicity of song, this would allow 500 two minute instrumental music files to fit in 1 mb, even more if compression is used. Good example of midi/kar player http://www.vanbasco.com/karaokeplayer/

--Rocke86

Real time music keyboard

Use the keyboard to make music, turns the laptop into an instrument! Simply map keyboard keys to notes and instruments, note length is determined by how long the keys are held down. Software keyboard is displayed on screen that shows what note is mapped to what keys and users can customize what range of notes and instruments are used.

If a midi system is present this could be a very small program. Advanced features such as record to midi file could be added to let children save their song in a small format that could be played back and edited with a composition program. This program’s functionality could be included in the composing application, but could be a separate app to keep its simplicity.

--Rocke86

Programming and Compiling Software

Since children have computers, they should have the tools to learn how to program them too. Probably with LOGO unless there are other programming languages that have been translated into other native natural languages other than English. Logo has been translated into many languages since the 80's, and there are books in those natural languages about Logo.

External Mass Storage Made Easy

Software to make it easy (for the not so computers savvy teacher too) to have and access external mass storage through the mesh. Physically located perhaps on a school computer or perhaps even somewhere on the internet.

Accessibility by disabled children

There are two sides to this. First of all, the laptop should be accessible to all children; we need to create magnifiers, use appropriate color schemes, text-to-sound software, and so forth so that visually impaired children can use it, and have the option of "subtitling" sound with written text on the screen for hearing impaired children, etc.

Things go the other way around as well. This laptop could be a huge boon to handicapped children, a tool that lets them access information and a world where they don't have to be seen as "disabled." I've been hearing-impaired since age 2, and my world changed entirely when my family got a computer with dialup internet when I was 10. I could read information and news I would otherwise have missed hearing, but best of all I could write to people without a communication barrier; it was the first chance I'd ever gotten to interact in a community where people didn't automatically know I was "disabled," and didn't treat me differently because of it. Without that computer, and without the internet, I probably wouldn't have started programming, ended up as an electrical engineering student, or been nearly as comfortable talking with technically-minded adults from all across the globe (hi!). It's my hope that the OLPC project will bring the same experience to kids that wouldn't otherwise have the chance at it.

I'd love to see OLPC software for children with disabilities. They wouldn't have to be loaded onto all laptops, but if they could be installed for children with special needs, that would be wonderful. Speech-to-text translation, using mesh networking in a classroom for collaborative notetaking (what one child misses, the others will probably catch), a program that could lead children through basic physical therapy exercises, and I'm sure others can think of more ideas. What can be done to make this happen?

--mchua

Text to speech

As mchua said text to speech would be great for the disabled, I also think this would be great for a wide range of other uses...

-reading aloud of textbooks, web, and text messages

-Radio like ability, avoiding heavy bandwidth and storage requirements of sound files. Children could bring the laptop home and have a group of people around to listen to news/info as it is read aloud.

-Ability of programmers to call and use this text to speech engine to speak and have dialog between two or more voices (saving space by not needing sound files)

-Teaching of languages/pronunciation

Since space and power is a concern, a speech to text engine would need to be small and not require a powerful CPU. By sacrificing quality a very small engine should be possible.

Take a look at AnalogX SayIt http://www.analogx.com/CONTENTS/download/audio/sayit.htm

It may not sound very pleasant, but with a little work a similar engine with various male/female voice presets would be quite feasible and have a small size. Work would be needed for different languages and pronunciations. Custom voices could also be created by students by adjusting speed, pitch, language and other settings.

--Rocke86