[kde-edu]: KEduca Replacement

[Anne-Marie Mahfouf]

HI Henrique,

Thanks for taking up KEduca and sharing us your ideas.
From what I heard about former KEduca, the new one will need:
- good printing support for printing the test
- good results display (that would be good to have a lib doing that if 
possible so it could be shared among other apps as KBruch, Kalcul, ...)
- encrypt the editor so the students cannot see the answers
- svg, images support, sound support in test creation
- dbus support
- tests sharing via GetHotNewStuff (what repository?) -> make it easy for 
teachers to reuse tests from others (the tests should be GPL so not taken 
literally from a text book I think, this has to be checked)

That's all for the moment. These points are more internal points that will 
come later after you started the 3 points you mentioned. The scheme you 
outlined makes sense for me!

I propose you start in KDE4 playground (seems to be 
branches/work/kde4/playground/edu) and you ask for any help at any time so we 
can make it possible for KDE4 (possible time frame = 6 months).
I'd be happy to help in small things such as DBus and testing.
KEduca was one of the first educational app in KDE and had a lot of users. 
It's something needed and I'd prefer it to be simple and to work flawlessly 
than to be too complex and buggy.

Happy coding!

Anne-Marie


On Sunday 12 November 2006 19:17, Henrique Pinto wrote:
> 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?