[kde-edu]: forward message

[Jason Harris]

Hello,

On Thursday 08 September 2005 09:46 am, Juan Luis Baptiste wrote:
> Both would be valid, but for the second one I would need to know exactly
> what has to be done to the existing app to be able to know the complexity
> of the work to be done so I know if my students can do it, or if it's
> enough work for them to earn their grade.
>
You can find some more TODO items on the KDE 4.0 features guide:
http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde-4.0-features.html
(scroll down to find Edu apps)

I suspect a lot of these are incomplete, however, so maybe more devs will 
speak up if they have internal TODO lists.

Unfortunately, there is an important logistical issue with trying to add 
features to an existing program right now: the development branch recently 
switched to Qt4, so most of the apps are in varying stages of getting the 
code working with the new library, and indeed you will find that the whole 
desktop is very unstable if you tried to build it from the development branch 
today.  This is an extra difficulty that your students would have to deal 
with, and could well impede the success of their projects. (Note that this 
issue wouldn't affect new projects so much; your students can develop these 
with their existing stable KDE installation)

Perhaps this would be a good time to take a straw poll among Edu maintainers, 
and Juan can direct his students to apps that have stabilized in the 
development branch.  What is the status of porting your app to Qt4?  Speaking 
for KStars, we are still in the "does not compile" stage, unfortunately.  We 
are refactoring a lot of things as we do the port, and I have been slowed 
down this week by bugfixing in the 3.5 branch.

As for new projects, I don't think we have a list of project ideas that 
haven't been started yet.  Maybe we should have such a list.  There was talk 
on IRC recently about expanding the scope of the module by adding apps to 
help educators, but I don't know much about it.  I've always thought it would 
be cool to have some kind of simple mechanics simulator, to graphically 
illustrate concepts such as velocity and acceleration, friction, conservation 
of energy and momentum, harmonic oscillation, etc.  Other ideas?

Jason
-- 
-------------------------------
KStars: KDE Desktop Planetarium
http://edu.kde.org/kstars