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

[Albert Astals Cid]

A Dimarts 29 Juliol 2008, Paulo Roberto Cattai va escriure:
> Hello list!

Hi

>
> 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/ ).

Seems a good starting point

> 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.

Good :-)

>
> 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?

Well, it's your time, so you decide :-) Actually i think the possibility to 
load from a file or somewhere else a pre-specified set of exercises is more 
interesting than the Lab feature, but that's my non-teacher 
non-anythingRelatedToTeaching point of view.

> 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.

Sebastian has not been working on kbruch since 2005.

I'm not saying his opinion is not important of course, but i'm not sure he 
still even reads this list, so don't wait for his OK.

Albert

>
> Best Regards,
> Paulo Roberto Cattai and LTIA Team