[kde-edu]: forward message

[Shelagh Manton]

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 10:40 -0700, Jason Harris wrote:
> 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

I have been following this list for a while because I have an idea for a
timeline progeam. Sadly however I am not a programmer. Tho' I have gone
through some parts of the QT tutorials. But I have too many projects on
to be successful at this at least in the short term. Maybe my idea may
be at a level that these students could tackle?

1. A simple database where dates and interesting snippets of historical
information can be entered. I envisioned this as a cardfile style
interface because that is easy for children to understand. Each timeline
would be one pack of cards. Then, this could be printed out (on screen
or on paper) as a time line.

2. thought this would be good to integrate with the wikipedia stuff.;
use this to research dates. 

3. Then I thought it might be useful to have concurrent timeline
printouts to say compare a musical history timeline with say on
invention timeline or political timeline.

This is my wonderful idea and I humbly submit it for your thought.

Shelagh