Subjects

In order to plan a suitable set of textbooks we need to discuss every subject in the K-12 curriculum. Please add subjects, links to Free textbooks, and relevant Free Software. As this discussion grows, we will need to separate out many of these subjects into separate pages.

We should create a Creative-Commons style license permitting translation and electronic publishing in languages of developing countries for literature, textbooks, and software. We would like to see completely Free licensing of educational materials, but it will be helpful in dealing with commercial publishers to have an intermediate license that expands their future market at essentially no cost to them, without cutting into current markets.

Music

Every schoolchild in The Netherlands learns to play recorder and read music. Plastic recorders cost about $5 each. The program could be adapted to handmade local instruments, including flutes or drums of various kinds.

There is a wide variety of MIDI editors and players, and many media players. Lilypond is a notation program that produces scores for printing as PDFs or in other formats.

Ear training software (GNU Solfege?)

Many cultures will want to preserve their traditional music. We will have to create a program for helping them preserve their intellectual property rights in this material.

Arts and Crafts

Children in many countries are gainfully employed making rugs and other items for international sale. Organizations like eBay, Overstock.com, and Novica/National Geographic can help them sell while staying in school, in stark contrast to traditional child labor. These e-commerce sites are active in dozens of countries, and are eager to expand to more. The creators receive something like 65% of the final selling price, as opposed to the pennies/hour that rug factories in Pakistan pay to their workers. The only conditions are (for Novica) that the goods can be delivered to their distribution centers in Africa and Asia, and (for all) that there be a reasonable way to communicate with the sellers (locally rentable mobile phone, knowing somebody who knows somebody who has a computer and Internet).

It seems likely that OLPC could become completely self-funding by organizing local businesses to assist sellers.

Free Software for graphics: The GIMP and many others

Reading and Writing

English is a particularly difficult language to [learn to read and write. Raymond Kurzweil researched the problem for the Reading Machine that he invented at MIT and made into his first product. His text-to-speech engine had more than 2,000 spelling rules programmed in, and in addition more than 2,000 exceptions (words like "once", and all the words ending in "ough").

See 40329/002744.html OUGH by Charles Battell Loomis

"He wound the bandage around the wound." etc.

However, few of the target local languages for OLPC are anything like that difficult to read and write, in large part because many of them have no historical spelling baggage to overcome.

In the 1960s, Omar Khayyam Moore programmed an IBM 360 with a Selectric printing terminal to teach children to read at age 2.

Literature

We must assist in the creation of online repositories of out-of-copyright and Creative-Commons licensed literature in all languages.

Arithmetic and Mathematics

Cuisenaire rods

Montessori materials

Free Software: Spreadsheets, calculators, symbolic math, mathematical programming languages from FORTRAN to APL, libraries.

Arithmetic of various kinds of numbers, from natural numbers to the complex field and Conway numbers

Notations: decimal and other bases, fractions, decimals

Analytic geometry

Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry

Number theory (essential for cryptography)

Trigonometry

Probability and statistics

calculus

logic

Set theory

Algebraic structures and categories

Free textbooks

Mathematical journals

Sciences

• Astronomy
  • sky map software
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day
• Periodic table software kalzium
• Data acquisition and analysis software
• Scientific visualization software
• Scientific journals
• Ecology
• Sustainable development

Languages

The Internet provides unequalled resources for the language learner: literature, dictionaries, grammars, translation aids, e-mail, chat, radio downloads and streams...

Yiddish Shraybmashinke

Japanese annotation of any page]

Cangjie Chinese typing tutorial pages

Dictionaries

History

Religions

Cultural

Political

Science and technology

Ideas

Human Rights

Geography

Google Earth! There is a Linux client from Google, and a project to produce a Free client.

Civics

Human rights

Constitutions

Treatises of government

Election observers

Economics

Free markets and human rights

Unions and labor law

Cooperatives

Theory of the Firm

Could you please ensure that there is made clear the distinction between a firm and a company in the courseware. The two words firm and company have specific meanings and are not synonyms. Unfortunately, some television presenters, perhaps with the journalistic idea of not repeating a word, use the words firm and company as synonyms, thereby losing from the English presented by them to the viewer the precision of the two words. If the distinction between a firm and a company is conserved from the start in the courseware then it will be straightforward to keep precision of meaning: sorting out a muddle if the two are used as if they can be freely interchanged would be a large task!

Programming

Dozens of programming languages

Integrated development environments (IDEs)

Free Software code repositories, such as SourceForge

Localization HOWTO

GNU, Linux, Gnome, KDE, QT,

Agile development

Computer Science

Database

Algorithms and data structures

Language recognizers

Turing machines and equivalent computing systems

Computable functions

Church's Thesis

Knuth's MIX computer emulation

Complexity of algorithms: P and NP