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

[Anne-Marie Mahfouf]

Hi Mauricio,

This is fabulous news and indeed making it possible to exchange data is the 
way to go!
Thanks a lot for the update, best regards,

Anne-Marie

On Friday 16 April 2010 06:06:33 Mauricio Piacentini wrote:
> 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
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