[kde-edu]: KEduca Replacement

[Henrique Pinto]

Hi all,

Some time ago, I removed KEduca from trunk, because the code was in bad 
state and it would be easier to rewrite it from scratch. Unfortunately, at 
that time, kdelibs was pretty broken for me. All apps would crash on 
startup, so it was difficult for me to work on anything.

I talked with some KEduca users about what features they would like to have 
in the software, and received some suggestions. Unfortunately, I don't know 
many KEduca users. The suggestions I received were:

 * New kinds of questions: In addition to the single/multiple choice 
   questions, there should be:
   - a "regex" question (where the user enters free-text in an input box, 
     and the answer is considered valid if it matches a configured regular
     expression.
   - a "cloze" question, where the user must fill in the blanks in a 
     sentence, i.e., something like:
     "___ doesn't play dice -- Albert Einstein".
 * A locked-down mode, where the "player" program would run in full-screen 
   and the user could not do things like changing to other apps.

My current plans are:

1) Initially, develop a widget that can display tests and create a library 
for it. It would consist of a View, which would be the widget itself, and a 
model describing the quiz. This way it would be easy to do things like 
auto-generating a test (you'd just have to subclass the model and add code 
for generating the questions).

2) Then, we'd need a editor for creating tests (i.e., a replacement for 
KEduca Editor). I could not find a stardard file format for tests, so I'll 
probably create a XML format.

3) Then, a Player. It should replace the program keduca, and it would be 
nice if it could, in addition to load tests from files saved by the editor, 
get tests from a server.

What do you think?


-- 
	Henrique Pinto
	henrique.pinto at kdemail.net