Educational toolkit

Educational Toolkit for OLPC

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Task Name

As the laptop will be used in the education of millions of children all around the world there is a need to have features that will radically change the way education is being imparted. With the introduction of a digital medium for imparting education, the testing procedures will also undergo an overhaul. For the same reason, there is a need to have an educational toolkit for OLPC.

The objective of this project will be to create a platform over which development of educational tests will be very easy. It will use the Python for development. After its development, even a simple rural teacher with no particular experience in programming would be able to create new exciting educational games and tests for his/her students.

To Do

1. Development of an easy to use tool for the development of new educational tests using Python.

2. Provide tutorials and examples to get a novice started and make new tests in the matter of minutes.

Use Case Scenario

1. Mr.Sharma is a geography teacher and wants his students to fill in the names of the states of India: He adds a map of India onto the drawing surface, Puts Fill in the Blanks and provide the right answers.Then he gives out the test to his students, they then submit their answers and the software checks their answers and reports their marks to Mr.Sharma.

2. Mr.Sharma is a language teacher and wants to test the vocabulary of his students. He prepares a set of MCQs containing various meaning to a difficult word. He sends out his test to his students who do it in a specified time and return their answers. The tool calculates results and report to Mr.Sharma.

Various Components

1. Support for adding the following types of questions within few clicks :
   1. Fill in the Blanks
   2. Multiple choice Questions
   3. Match the following
   4. True/False
   5. Image based Questions.
2. Support for entering answers to the questions by the teacher.
3. Porting a question paper for the laptops of students.
4. Ability to send and receive filled question papers.
5. Automated Result Generation.

For component 1 and 2, easy to use GUI will be developed and libraries over PyGame API will be written which will make developement of quizzes a child play.

For components 3 & 4, a simple module for sending the files over the network would be written using send-and-relay protocols. For component 5, the results will be stored in a database in xml or crossmarks format which a teacher can use furthur too.

Future work will involve the development of a feature to allow a teacher to send his feedbacks to the students which will be preferably kept using CrossMarks or XML. Apart from that, new features would be developed in the future.

Another feature would be to allow monitoring/restriction of time constraints and of use of other features of the laptop - specifically, communication, calculators, and browsers. Not all tests should be "silent, closed-book", but definitely some should be. Similarly, the honor system is great, but it works a whole lot better when there's a credible threat that enforcement would be possible if the honor system broke down.Homunq 15:33, 31 July 2007 (EDT)

Contact Me

My name is Deepank Gupta. Please feel free to add your valuable comments, criticism and ideas in the discussion page and contact me at - deepankgupta@gmail.com. I am looking forward towards getting support in this initiative.