the younger set

[pkienzle@kienzle.powernet.co.uk (Paul Kienzle)]

Hi! I have a three-year-old who is just entering the education system (my
they start them early in England), so I don't have a lot of experience
with educational software.  We have a few of the Brøderbund Living
Books series which he quite likes, plus Creative Wonders Sesame Street
Art Workshop.  I haven't been able to run any of these under Wine [it
isn't realizing the colour palette properly, and my feeble attempts
to fix it made no headway], so I spent a couple of weeks writing my
own StickerBook program (http://users.pwernet.co.uk/kienzle/stickers).
As it stands, it may have a place in an early school art curriculum.

With some minor changes to StickerBook (adding labels to the stickers
and displaying them when they are selected) and some proper content,
StickerBook could be used for introductory botany.  Have each
scene represent a different geographical area, with stickers for
the fauna and flora native to that area.  I wonder if any of the
various botanical societies would provide images and sounds without
redistribution restriction?  I did a quick web search a while back,
but nothing leaped out.  Natural history would also lend itself to
this treatment, with each page dedicated to contemporaneous species.
I suppose one could write a testing tool which requires you to paste
a random selection of stickers into their appropriate niche. For me,
I wouldn't want something that overtly "educational".

This paradigm can't be extended to the reveal the underlying ecology.
For that, you need a simulation engine which allows you to create/destroy
habitat, add/remove species, increase/decrease the temperature, etc.
Perhaps lincity can be modified to this end.  Add a bit of random
variation (how well generations react to different food sources for
example) and you can get some evolution happening too.  [If you eliminate
all the land based critters, how long does it take for a parrot to turn
into a rabbit?]  I believe Maxis has something along this line, but I
have no idea what they've done with it.

If there is interest amongst the artistic types in the group, I could
create an engine for animated story books.  Grimm's fairy tales is a
ready source of content (hey, it works for Disney), as indeed are any
other collections of folk or religious texts.  I would base it on the
heart of StickerBook, with a few extra pieces such as text support, sound
support (there are a couple of network aware audio servers which might
work, but I don't have any idea how to sync them with the animation),
and a good speech engine (with 20 or 30 languages, you don't want to
ship audio for each of them).  This may be more than I can tackle alone,
but some of the pieces may already be out there.  Suggestions?

More ambitious types could create "A day in the life of" book series,
showing an individual going about their day.  You could use this for
teaching history (how does technology change day-to-day life) and culture
(how do people in different parts of the world live).  For advanced
students freeciv is another approach to teaching how history works if not
the details of our particular history.  I suppose you could initialize
it with an actual historical state, e.g., the Mediterranean at the time
of the birth of Julias Caesar, and see how many classrooms end up with
Rome conquering all.

Enough rambling.

Paul Kienzle
pkienzle@kienzle.powernet.co.uk

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