Project to stimulate Edu-FLOSS development

Bastien Guerry bzg at gnu.org
Mon Jan 9 07:27:30 UTC 2017


Hi Charles,

I find the whole idea very interesting, thanks for sharing it.

At OLPC France (a grassroots organization, born in 2008 after I spent
some time working for OLPC), we are developing http://sugarizer.org

It is a rewrite of the Sugar environment (https://sugarlabs.org) in
HTML and Javascript.  You can try it here: http://try.sugarizer.org

I've also dedicated some time last year to a free software to let
children learn how to read, write and count.  It is called "Kalulu",
it is currently under heavy development, and will be available soon.

You can see the code here :
https://dev.kalulu-education.org/cyprien/kalulu-the-gathering

but the developers still need to package and document it properly.

I'm mentioning those two projects because several of your concerns
were part of the discussions we held for those two software.

For Sugarizer: children use it on their tablets, and they connect to a
Raspberry Pi 3 located in the classroom.  When children connect to the
Sugarizer server on our RPi3, they can resume their sessions, store
their activities, discuss together, etc.  The RPi3 is also used to
store videos and audio, because we found out accessing internet while
in the classroom was neither easy nor very useful, attention-wise.

For now children are free to play with any activity, but having a
framework where the teacher can say : "Children A has to learn X in
order to access to Activity Z" would certainly be useful.

As for Kalulu, conditional learning paths is at the very heart of the
conception of the software.  Children are required to learn a lesson,
then can reinforce what they learned by freely playing with treasures
that unlock progressively.  (The cognitive scientist Stanislas Dehaene
has been involved in designing this software, and it implements well
tested research about motivation and learning, at least for learning
how to read, write and count.

So in general, I invite you to test sugarizer and I'll let you know
when Kalulu is available for testing, as both may be of interest for
your project -- either as softwares you can contribute to, or as
platforms that would benefit from your ideas and code.

Both are HTML/JS and use an Apache 2.0 license.

All best,

-- 
 Bastien



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