Re: [seul-edu] Linux in Elementary (SMTP)

[Colin Dellow <plarf@moo.ca>]

> Ideally, to get Linux on the desktop in education you need to simplify the
> UI, get the big commercial software houses to begin supporting it, set it
> up correctly, and lock it down. Train. Repeat.

So far I've been avoiding this discussion, but I feel I must reply to this
thread.  I personally feel I'm in a good position to do this as I am a
student, who is supposed to be the one using this software, I'm a
programmer and I am the son of a teacher.

The big commercial software houses don't need to begin supporting us. If
they do, and if they release open source and free software, that's great. If
not, that's also great.

>Honestly, and it's admittedly been a few years (Win95 days), I found most
>"educational" software obnoxious.  Mostly, it was too loud.
>I was quite amused to see a "Game Developer" article all about it
>recently.  (How edutainment games should really quite with the annoying 
>SFX)

This is *exactly* on the money.  Good educational software is frankly
all from the 1980s.  I volunteer my time at a school that has iMacs and
PowerPPCs, but still keeps a lab of Apple ][e's in use so they can use
Alligator Math and other games which I have sadly forgotten the titles
of.

A teacher there wanted a simple program to drill students on math facts,
bought 4 different programs all proclaiming to do just that, and discovered
that all had far too many graphics, sound clips, games and *movie clips*.
She asked me about this and I wrote a simple console program to do this --
and customizable, too.  All four operations were supported, you could set
minimum and maximum addends (or divisors, etc), and it kept track of the time
required to complete it.  This is what she wanted.  I assume this is what a lot
of teachers want: *Functional* software, preferably feature packed, but software
where they know they'll find content instead of syntactic sugar to make things
sell off the local Future Shop's shelves.

Oh, and on a side note (*grin*) -- I pride myself on figuring out interfaces
that boggle others' minds.  Most of this educational software is *not*
intuitive at all.  "Oh, I see.  Click on the galactic warp drive, drag it over
to the repair station, and *then* you answer 10 addition questions. Cute."

And quite frankly, the talent to create this software is out there, and it's
free.  Knock and the door shall be opened.

Sorry to vent, but a lot of this software irks me. :)

-- 
-- Colin Dellow
	plarf@moo.ca  - "Programming is like sex: one mistake and you
			 have to support it for the rest of your life."
			 	- Michael Sinz