[IAEP] sugar framework

[Carol Farlow Lerche]

I apologize for misstating Wade's name!

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 12:53 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche <cafl at msbit.com>wrote:

> I think that's an excellent proposal, and it is probably something that was
> in the mind of the "develop" activity developer.  But I think (as Bryan
> mentioned in his conversation) that it isn't necessary to hypothesize doing
> this activity building on the XO itself.  Many developers work on more
> powerful systems than their target platform, just because development IDEs
> and other development tools are often heavyweights.  This doesn't mean that
> the developer can't be working within Sugar, now that Sugar is almost
> production-ready as a part of Linux distributions for other hardware.
>
> With that prolog, there are various open source IDE and app building
> platforms that could be the basis for this, including Glade and Eclipse.   I
> do think that Wayne's suggestion of making it easier to have activities that
> use a local web server as part of the architecture (rather than an ad hoc
> component that individual activities each have to hack in) is excellent and
> would open a lot of new activity opportunities.
>
> An idea of mine that I would like to work on to expand the scope of
> literacy activities is to build an underlying English word/image bank
> resource based in part on
> "The Sounds of English" <http://call.canil.ca/english/index.html>, a
> website that offers rich tools to construct word lists for phonics-based
> teaching, which is one big component of English literacy.  The idea would be
> to make such activities as memory and the gcompris word games draw their
> words from this underlying resource, so that a child could progress through
> the stages of reading and spelling the words in these categories in a
> sensible, teacher driven manner.  I don't know how much the phonics emphasis
> translates to other languages, but I am sure it is applicable in part, and
> even more sure that the idea of an underlying word/image bank is even more
> universal.  Also many of the deployments seem to want to teach English as a
> second language.
>
> "Free-Reading.net" is a website offering many resources for teaching early
> readers It has a complete open-source curriculum "Intervention A" that has
> even been formally accepted as a choice for use in  Florida public schools.
> I think a lot of their teacher-driven activities could translate to Sugar
> activities.  It might be interesting to try to systematically implement
> these as a way to be more relevent to the youngest learners.
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 12:15 PM, David Van Assche <dvanassche at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>   So today a couple of us education enthusiasts were contemplating
>> the recent discussions concerning an easier activity creation method,
>> which might involve ajax or Flash. The problem with Flash, apart from
>> its proprietary nature, is the fact that it doesn't really do
>> collaboration, one of the corner stones of sugar. It came to my mind
>> that to make things easier for content creators, a structured method
>> for creating activities is what is really needed. Something like a
>> framework, as is available for many languages (think django or python)
>> but with a very specific aim, building educational apps that include
>> collaboration. I can foresee something like that making many more
>> educators interested in coding educational apps. The framework
>> wouldn't have to be very complicated at all, it could just be a higher
>> set of commands (something like etoys, but simpler) that are
>> specifically focused to making the sugar activity ui, help with
>> collaboration, and then have a specific set of available instructions.
>> I've never been involved in the creation of a framework, so maybe what
>> I'm saying isn't realistic, but its an idea....
>>
>> kind Regards,
>> David Van Assche
>> www.nubae.com
>> _______________________________________________
>> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "Don't think for a minute that power concedes. We have to work like our
> future depends on it."  -- Barack Obama
>



-- 
"Don't think for a minute that power concedes. We have to work like our
future depends on it."  -- Barack Obama
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