[kde-edu]: KEduca resurrection (possible GSoC project)

[Mauricio Piacentini]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Anne-Marie Mahfouf
<annemarie.mahfouf at free.fr> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I read on a blog that some work started for KEduca-New, is
> it in playground yet?

Hi, Annma! Not yet. I just arrived in Sao Paulo, after being stranded
in Salvador due to the very bad weather (flooding, flights
cancelled...) I will blog about it tomorrow in more detail, but here
is how it looks so far: I met with a team of 4 people from Syst, a
company based in Belo Horizonte that produces educational software and
is responsible for the Metasys distro, used in several cities and
states in Brazil, including large areas of Minas Gerais. They want to
contribute to KDE and the resurrection of KEduca, and approached me
soon after I posted about the possible GSoC project. We talked a
little bit and I decided to not go for the GSoC project, and instead
help them with this effort.

Internally, the new KEduca will use a database to store questions and
tests. Unlike the previous version, it will be possible to create
questions before they are associated with a project, or test, and also
reuse them. There is the plan to support KNS3 for upload/download of
tests as well. We worked a little bit on prototyping the UI, and I
will let Eduardo (the person that will be working on it) post here
with more information on it :)

The file format for import/export will be compatible with the qti
standard. It is interesting to notice that this matches the design
decisions made by Matt two years ago, so we are probably on the right
track. This makes it possible for example to exchange information with
Moodle and other educational software, including vClass, a product
from Syst that already exists and runs on Windows and Linux. They will
open source the development of the import/export libraries for this,
on KDE source tree, under LGPL. The team that will be working on this
is:

Main contact/maintainer (KEduca work and KDE liaison)
Eduardo Samaan

qti import/export library developers
André Fellipe
Cristiano Costa

Volunteers that will work on KEduca GUI and coding:
Daniel Nascimento - Syst
Duda Nogueira - Syst
Luiz Tiago - Syst
Rodolfo Pereira - DjangoStudio

They currently develop some of the code that will be integrated into
KDE SVN in Gitorious. If KDE moves to a git installation we could
integrate there, otherwise Eduardo will commit to our SVN.

It is interesting to notice that they ALREADY have vClass, a product
that can be used to build tests and quizzes.
<http://www.metasys.com.br/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25&Itemid=37&lang=en>.
So why help with KEduca? Their intention is to share some of their
knowledge and code with KDE, and keep it on our source control system,
adhering to our standards. The advantage for them is that all KEduca2
users will be producing content that is automatically compatible with
a standard format for tests, and can be exchanged freely with both
their product and other solutions as well. So the thousands of
teachers that will be using Linux Educacional next year in Brazil will
be able to exchange information with other free (and non free)
software. I see this as a good experiment for us: they have interest
(and paid developers) that will make sure the code keeps working, as
this benefits their products as well. It is something we have not had
yet in KDE-Edu, let us see how it develops.

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini

PS: Metasys (the distro) is several years old, and ships with KDE by
default (http://www.metasys.com.br/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=50&Itemid=34&lang=en).
So the developers are pretty confortable with Qt and our environment,
let us hope this translates into more collaboration with upstream.