Re: [school-discuss] SchoolForge Art Gallery?

[Bruno Coudoin <bruno.coudoin@xxxxxxx>]

Selon Charles Cosse <ccosse@xxxxxxxxx>:

> Gcompris seems like great software, also Childsplay, and certainly not
> intending to step on any toes
> GCompris is close to what i'm thinking, but
> [1]it doesn't take data,

True but very few of our activities really need it. The most needed one would be
to let teacher use their list of words to teach. It's not very complex to do but
for now the only way if to find the flat file and put your words in it.

It's important to remember that for most teachers, customizing an application to
their needs will bring too much complexity and they often don't have the time to
do it.

> [2]is it multi-user (accounts)?

Of course, yes. But we also provide the possibilities to have internal accounts
for those who don't create a system account per user but still want to gather by
user data or create profiles in GCompris.

You can get more info about this in our manual:
http://gcompris.net/wiki/index.php/Manual

> [3]it's not exactly "underneathe" a specific
> application, but seems to be, rather, that applications plug-into it.
> Correct me if i'm wrong -- i haven't studied them in great detail, and
> probably should before sticking my neck out like this, but time is limited
> for us all...

Yes, that's it, we have a core engine and activity plugins. We keep them under a
close control and thus can make a good maintenance and distribution of the
whole. You can compare it to game engine and data maps.

By the way, until now, it was hard to distribute each activity individually but
we made a lot of change in our code base to support that.
This is documented in the wiki page bellow, there is even the instructions to
test that:
http://gcompris.net/wiki/index.php/Todo_for_OLPC

>It's only an example.  It would be
> best to start-over with a group of developers, such as the folks behind
> GCompris, Childsplay, TuxPaint, SchoolForge, teachers,
> administrators...hopefully it wouldn't collapse under it's own weight.

Well, GCompris is designed to be easily extended, it now has a critical mass and
visibility and is very well maintained (7 years of  development for now). What
is important to me is the maintenance and coherency of the whole. You can get a
student to create an activity from scratch but will it even compiles a year from
now, will it be packaged by the distro leaving, it's not sure.

If you are looking for an ecosystem to develop educational content, you should
look at the OLPC project closely because the project is ambitious and forces
everybody to follow certain rules. To me it has the potential to make a
comprehensive and very innovative full set of educational software. Why not
having the sugar interface running on LPSP or regular PC in schools.

-- 
http://gcompris.net Free Educational Software