EDUcation LaunchPad

[Micah Yoder <LYoder@cyberis.net>]

Douglas Loss wrote:

> Micah, where do you waant to take the edulp?  Is it something that a group
> could profitably work on, or is it better done by an individual?

Ahh, so many options!  Well, I know I want it to implement much of the
functionality of presenting educational programs to students in a list,
make a friendly face where they can easily select one, make a parent's
module where a parent can install a program and set goals on a
per-student basis, and keep track of the student's progress and possibly
grades.

I think it should be designed by 2 or 3 people, the design should be
sent to the list for comments, then be developed by 2 or 3 people.

What about the language - is Perl/Tk out?  (Perl/Tk is, of course, what
I already wrote it in!)  If we integrate it with GNOME, we could either
rewrite it in C (probably no big deal) or convert it to Perl/GTK (and I
think there are Perl CORBA bindings as well, so it could integrate
itself into the system).

Has anyone seriously thought about using an RDBMS for this system?  I'm
starting to think that may be the best way to store stuff if we have a
lot of data and a lot of students, each of which could use a different
computer.  It would probably be PostgreSQL, since we want this to be
100% open source.  Or the GNU SQL Server, but I don't know if it's ready
yet.

We also need it to be easy to install and work nearly everywhere.  I
originally intended EDULP to be for both school and home.  An RDBMS
would probably complicate things to much for home use.  How would XML
fit in here?

One other XML concern - if I understand correctly, XML is just stored as
one long text file.  Wouldn't there be a performance penalty on that if
there was a lot of data?  Something has to rip through all the tags to
find stuff.

I guess abstraction of the data storage/retrieval is essential if we
want this to scale well.....  that's probably obvious.  DBMs or XML
would work well in home, RDBMSs in large schools.

Just more random thoughts...