KDE Edu BoF, Akademy 2013 in Bilbao

Attendees: Albert, Aleix, Andreas (CoLa), Antonio, Baltasar, David, dmaggot, spacetime,...

State of the Projects

KGeography (Albert)
- It's OK
Blinken (Albert)
- will be ported to the Playbook.eventually
KStars (spacetime)
- added new interface for beginners
- UI needs a lot of work but is useful
- Needs for polishing
Kig (David Narvaez)
- Promote algebra and geometry
- Add support for geogebra files (read only)
- Replacing the math that happens behind X
- Expect to port it to a mobile device (maybe a playbook) / Interface is too mouse oriented
Antonio (Khipu)
- Change the UI in Khipu
- Khipu will replace Kmplot eventually
- It does more things that kmplot
- KAlgebra -> For students to work (homework)
- Khipu -> For teachers to demonstrate
- dmaggot: We should have demos that illustrate the use cases of the applications Cantor, Kalgebra, Khipu etc
- apol: Already working on an artwork project that will help to unify our math applications
Rocs (CoLa)
- Rewrote scripting API
- In program documentation for the scripting API
Artikulate (Andreas)
- Pronunciation improvement application
- Early stage
- Already 2 students working on it
- Estimates a fully usable version in 1-2 months
- Wants to support a set of languages (begin with Bengali, Polish, French, English)
- In fall will do a lot of advertisement for language recording contributions (workload for single language ~20-30 h)
- Try to ship a windows version also in fall

Application Request (Baltasar)
- It would be a nice idea to write a program to make a 'Rubric' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubric_(academic)
- How do you find out a student's presentation is good or not?
- Criterea: eg. Clarity of Speech: rating 0 - 10 (say)
- apol: We need to encourage the model where the teachers request features/apps
Language Learning
- CoLa and Frederik have a BoF tomorrow morning about Parley, Artikulate and KLettres and how they can be used together to learn a new language.
- Features of Parley and KWordQuiz are nearly identical: one should be deprecated
Windows Support is getting better
- KTouch now works
- Step still doesn't work
- Separate installers for separate applications not encouraged
- spacetime may try to create a simple installer for Windows for only KStars
Kig
- Can C++11 be used?
- GCC 4.5 is the baseline version for compatibility
- Need to ask the teams (Windows etc) if GCC 4.7 C++11 can be used.
- The project needs to decide if it needs newer features by compromising on platforms that may not support GCC 4.7
dmaggot: how about packaged files for use by teachers directly using our software.

David (teacher): Document Sharing
- Teachers need to share documents with tags like "Exams, Presentations, Examples" for each Topic.
- Teachers need to quickly locate and upload these resources
- apol: We have bodega which could be extended, it's a server side application
- KDE Spain can help with the adoption and communication
David (teacher): organization of class rooms
- the person who has to organize and allot courses, teachers, classrooms has a lot of problems since the classes are limited.
- CoLa: It's a real problem, computationally hard to solve, but a real-world problem for schools that is important
- There are open source alternatives maybe (Fet) but the UI is horrible.
- Need a adapted application with specific UI?
- David will write a detailed specification, he says
Problem:
- How do you get documents from teachers?
- A lot of professors share information/files that should be interesting to use in KDE Edu
- Most spanish teachers use 'dayclick' which is a simple tool to create simple games
- We have to adapt to the situation we have at hand
- Teacher: We can also develop programs to help kids to specific problems like dyslexia. These programs are very expensive for schools and mandatory.
- spacetime: How about an easy way to submit files?
- We've had a GSoC Project resembling this in a past that didn't work out.