[kde-edu]: Kalzium: About future developments

[Carsten Niehaus]

Hi

I would like to hear some opinions about the future of Kalzium. In the last 
weeks I recieved for some reason a lot mails from users. I can devide them 
into 2 usergroups:

Science: "Carsten: Add more data, add a molweight-calculator, make the 
plotting better, add export to csv, make the table display all kinds of data"

Education: "Carsten: Add explanations (both text and graphic) to Kalzium. Make 
the plotting a _learning_ tool so that kids learn what it is all about. Make 
Kalzium look like a edu-tool, not like a laboratory-tool. Explain in the 
information-dialog about what it is all about."

I for one use Kalzium more like a scientist but of course I would _love_ to 
see Kalzium as a "real" educational application. Here are my plans for KDE4 
(not all will be implemented because I need co-developers, artists and so 
on).

- Add a table which displays more data
 + makes kalzium easier to use for chemists
 - need 1024x768 as the elements will need 50x50 pixel to make the font     
readable
 - pupil don't need it so it has to be optional

- Add a table which shows the element in pictograms (see attached screenshot, 
you see the three pictograms of boron, carbon and nitrogen from a schoolbook 
I own)
 + good for educational things
 - chemists don't use/need it
 - I can't draw them, I would need an artist

- Add longish texts everywhere for learning users
 + good for educational things
 - translators will hate me
 - the text depend on the age of the user so I might need to make the 
"text-level" configurable (translators will hate me even more)
 - chemists don't need it at all

- Integrate eqchem (see [1])
 + good for everyone
 - Nagy needs to do it
 - might add dependencies to Kalzum/kdeedu

As you can see the features will help one group and be useless or even 
disturbing for the other group. What does this mean for me? I could 
split/fork Kalzium and create a Kalzium-science-edition outside of kdeedu 
(kdeextragear-3 for example) or I could make it configurable in which "mode" 
Kalzium starts. The modes would differ in which tables are available, if 
longish text are shown, if information would be displayed in the table and so 
on. I don't want to make everything configurable because that would make 
Kalzium harder to use for pupil and chemists would anyway use the "gimme no 
explanation but all information"-setting.

Now I need input what to do. Without input I don't know what to do. I think 
esp. Jason knows this problematic situation.

Carsten

[1] - http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=14542

-- 
We cannot command nature except by obeying her.
  -- Sir Francis Bacon
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