KDE e.V./Sprints/KdeEdu-2010

KDE-Edu Meeting at Randa (Switzerland) 20th to 25th May 2010

Meeting Scope

Enforce a KDE-Edu identity and community: we were 11 developers for KDE-Edu and for 3 of them it was the first KDE meeting. This is a good balance between new comers and steady developers and shows how healthy the KDE-Edu team is: during the last five years, there is a constant flow of people leaving and new people coming and nearly all applications are always maintained.
Integrate a designer: an artist from Brazil also was invited. It is important not to have only a programmer approach of the problems!
Collaboration with users: we had 2 people from Vox Humanitatis as we had started since a few months a collaboration with them. They use our software and have data for them. The goal was to get to know each other better which is better done face to face than via emails or IRC.
Software: see what scope each program has, how we can plan the future, refine the use of libraries, ...

Conclusions

Better promotion of KDE-Edu

A logo was started (the concept is a simple plant with 2 leaves growing from the U of Edu: your knowledge grows with KDE-Edu)
More blogs about our work
Better use of social networks
Port the Edu website to the new KDE template and make better use of Userbase and Techbase where it is easier to contribute than static webpages.

KDE-Edu is used in huge numbers in some countries (Brazil for example) and is an important asset for promoting KDE SC as a whole!

Cooperation with Vox Humanitatis

Bèrto 'd Sèra and Sabine Emmy Eller from Vox Humanitais were invited at the meeting to extend our collaboration. An export of Ambaradan data into kvtml2 format was successfully created by Vox Humanitatis. This means that Parley and also other applications can retrieve the data from Ambaradan directly without "intermediate conversion". As test data we used Agrovoc by FAO. Parley was able to digest the huge file with 100.000 entries and still remained fast. The complete dataset for Agrovoc for now will consist of 56 language combinations. For the future this means that data can be acquired fast, directly from Ambaradan which also means that our contents creating team can concentrate on the terminology entries only without needing to think about manual data conversion. Further ways of co-operation with other KDE projects were discussed and we will come back to these points step by step (use of KLettres which teaches alphabet and has already several languages sounds for example).

Guidelines for Educational Software

It should be easy to create content for our programs: we should enforce this point.
Use or support existing free formats: the new KEduca for example should be compatible with Moodle and other test formats.
Make more generic programs instead of focusing in a narrow age target => regroup several programs within one framework in the future