Talk:Educational Software

This should be seperated

• What kind of applications are important
• How to make the software
• Which programming languages should be used to teach programming (this should be moved to a seperat page)

Interactive Lerning Tools

What is important to teach

• Writing
• Mathematics
• Local geography
• Agricultural knowledge
• health (aids, hygienic)

How to teach

• education games
• knowledge tests
• lexicon

How to make this programms

• Compiled programms (C++)
• Interpreted software (Python)
• Browserbased HTML + SVG with javascript (There is no flash player)

Ready to use software

Please give translating infos (software + documention)

This page is completely messed

To teaching IT knowledge is only a very small part of Education. To teach programming is not main purpose of this laptop.

You are right that the page is messed up a bit, but you are wrong about programming. Please, if you want to support the OLPC project, read about constructionist education theories of Seymour Papert.

MUSEs or MOOs

This was moved to discussion because intranets are not necessarily going to be available to OLPC users

A MUSE or MOO software to run on an intranet.

The MUSE as an Educational Medium

http://underground.musenet.org:8080/WCE/Muse.in.Education.html

MUDs in Education, New Environments, New Pedagogies

http://www.ibiblio.org/cmc/mag/1995/jan/fanderclai.html

What can my students do at MundoHispano

http://www.umsl.edu/~moosproj/academic.html

This is a silly idea. Software for the OLPC needs to be primarily self-contained and should only expect intermittent ability to communicate. For instance, during the day at school the OLPCs can talk. But in the evening, they will have few opportunities except for close neighbours. In addition, the users can be expected to take breaks for recharging sessions.

Touch Typing Software

A version of some Touch Typing software and typing games to teach these kids to touch type, the faster you can work with a keyboard whatever age you are then the faster you can get on with solving the worlds problems and letting the world know about your solutions... ' eg unjustified government spending on military budgets that will eventully only lead to one thing, more War to justify more spending etc..."

It should be noted that many keyboards are laid out far more logically than the Latin-alphabet QWERTY and its near relatives in France (AZERTY), Germany (QWERTZ), and elsewhere. Indic-alphabet keyboards have all the vowel signs on one hand and all the consonants on the other, and have the consonants grouped logically by sound type--for example t, th, d, dh, in one column. Also, the spelling rules are much simpler. So it is much easier to learn typing in languages that use these alphabets.

Also someone thing that is not clear but you don't need to be cranking the computer while you use it. Some one else could or if nobody else is available, you can crank for a while, and then type. Or you could use batteries charged from solar power arrays.

I found the follwoing list of Touch typing software that exists already, there are also a number of other existing companies that provide Typing Tutor Software (Mavis Beacon etc) and I would hope that for a project such as this the companies would be able to provide opensource alternatives. http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Educational/Typing/

Cameron 23 March 2006

ViOS-like information indexing system

In early 2001 I saw an illustrated post in the alt.binaries.education.distance newsgroup about the ViOS system.

The system offered a third party view virtual world 3d landscape as a way of indexing the web.

A description remains on the web.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/vios1.htm

There are also some notes on ViOS in the following document,

http://jlombardi.blogspot.com/2004_10_01_jlombardi_archive.html

I wonder if I may please suggest that the ViOS look is worth considering as a way of indexing information sources for the users of the $100 laptop.

It might perhaps be possible to have the display done by a relatively small program and the data in blocks which could be fetched from a server as needed.

William Overington

9 March 2006

SCORM

SCORM is a well-developed global standard for distributing and reusing interactive content. The client installation for running SCORM packages appears to be large as it uses the Java runtime environment. However, the RELOAD Apache-Tomcat player has been packaged into a 90-MB live CD using PuppyLinux, and work is underway to see how SCORM can be run with less resources, such as with the 90-MB live CD acting as server and with smaller Java client environments such as Blackdown Java. This is one of volunteer projects at PuppyLinux. - Raffy of puppylinux.org, May 6, 2006

No can do; we will not shipping or supporting Java on the laptops. --Ivan Krstic

JAVA

Java will not be available on the laptops - idea for possible alternatives, one for short term use and one for long term use

I have noticed the comment about not shipping or supporting Java on the laptops in the section above and I seem to remember previously seeing somewhere that Java would not be used on the laptops because it was a proprietary product, even though, I seem to remember, there had been an offer of a free licence by Sun.

One key feature of Java is the portability of Java across platforms and such portability would be good for the future. So I am wondering whether the idea is the following document would be of interest.

[The Catalyst Processor project]

If such a system were implemented in ISO/IEC 10646 (to which Unicode is locked) then the possibilities of a portable object code could be achieved without the proprietary aspects of Java.

William Overington 16 May 2006

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Are the objections to Java based SOLELY on its non-open status? If Sun follows through on its recent announcement that it will open source Java, will this decision be re-visited?

jeffa 17 May 2006

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It's safe to say that the largest impediment is the lack of an open jre from Sun. Sun has been making noises about open sourcing Java under an acceptable license for years. We would need action, not rhetoric. And we're already building out software in Python so the longer that they wait, the less chance it will be worth it to use Java. A couple of months ago we sent an olive branch to Sun and they rejected it so the ball is in their court.

Christopher Blizzard 17 May 2006