[kde-edu]: Advances in contributing to KDE-Edu

[Paulo Roberto Cattai]

Hello list!

We were recently introduced here on the mailing list. Thank you all for the
welcome. As Tiago said, we'll collaborate during next months with some
projects involving KDE. In this email I'll show what we'd like to do as a
first step.

Our intention is to start on Kbruch with a new feature related to education
and some changes related to usability and interface. Here they are:
Changes:

Redesign of Fraction, Comparison, Conversion and Factorization Task: The
changes are related to positioning and dimension of some elements on the
screen. We are also considering Celeste's review of KBruch (
http://obso1337.org/hci/kbruch/ ).
New feature:

We want to program a feature we called "Lab": It could be an option in Help
menu, for example. We didn't think the best place for it yet. How it works?
You access the feature and then a screen appears with collections of disks
that will help the user to solve the problem. So, it's not a tutorial and
it's not a solver. It's something to help. The best way to think about these
disks is remembering a pizza. A piece of pizza is (usually) 1/8 of the
entire pizza. So if I have to compare ½ with 4/8 I can take two disks, fill
then with pieces and visually compare if ½ is less than, greater than or
equals 4/8. The disks help me to understand how both fractions relate to
each other. To clarify, see these links:

   - http://www.visualmathlearning.com/Exercises/fraction_rings.html
   - http://www.eaieducation.com/530161.html
   - http://www.eaieducation.com/530219.html

We didn't decide its interface yet.

First, we'll start with the redesign changes and show you what we are
planning. After that, we'll plan this new feature and show you details.

There's something we have to ask you. During our brainstorms we figured out
another feature. Where the teacher can build his own sequence of: fractions,
comparisons, conversions, factorizations or a mix of them. Because of time,
we had to choose one feature and we chose the lab feature. But… we recently
saw on Kbruch website ( http://edu.kde.org/kbruch/ ) this to-do: add "test
cases for class task". We are not certain, but are we talking about the same
feature? If yes, what all of you think: Should we create lab feature or test
cases feature now?
It's really important to know what the maintainer of KBruch think. So,
Sebastian, your feedback is really important. Any tips, comments and
suggestions are always welcome.

Best Regards,
Paulo Roberto Cattai and LTIA Team
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