<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-2" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> In June I was talking with the headmaster of a school which does education research. There are two things from that discussion that seems relevant for this question:<br> <br> 1. Karma could measure the time it takes to finish a task in a compound exercise. If it is statistically relevant then it could give some hint to the teacher which parts of the curriculum are hard for the given child. If I will be able to persuade the headmaster then there will be research (hard data) which hopefully will find out whether this measurement is meaningful or pointless.<br> <br> 2. There is a VERY HARD to develop exercise model where the child can follow multiple paths to the solution. In this case the possible choices the child can follow makes a graph with most of the leaves ending with "does not compute". If this exercise model proves to be useful (which will be determined in the mentioned research) then Karma should store the way the child solved the exercise and not only the end result. So what I wanted to say is that it is possible that the wrong steps can give more informations to the teacher about the knowledge of the child than the fact whether the child was able to solve the exercise or not.<br> Because the 2. point can be a little bit hard to understand, here is an example:<br> The problem is this: "If we used A amount of paint to fully paint a little picture with sides B and C, how much paint do we need to fully paint a room with sides D, E and height F?"<br> This is an exercise with 3 steps. The child has to calculate the area of the picture (P=BxC) and the walls' (W=(D+E)*F*2) and has to calculate A/P*W.<br> Now the graph looks something like this: from the beginning the child can calculate either area or can do something like B*E which "does not compute". If he has P and W then he can do either A/P or W/P then either A/P*W or W/P*A respectively. In every step the program should graphically show what the child just have calculated (what can be impossible if he uses D*E*F*B for example).<br> <br> Now I do not insist that you develop this 2. point since it is a HUGE task (and needs some research to know whether it really help children understand complex relationships) but moving Karma into this direction (just a little bit) would help a lot if the headmaster would decide to do this research. In this case we will translate the resulting exercises to English, probably you will be interested in that.<br> <br> ps:<br> I intend to use Karma for interactive curriculum development for reasons Bryan Berry talked about a lot.<br> <br> ps2:<br> By research I mean "try out with kids while somebody from the University measures the outcome".<br> <br> <br> Christoph Derndorfer wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:bae28afe0907282240r19371c86v610c174d623ed864@mail.gmail.com" type="cite">As previously mentioned by Bryan in his "Automated Assessment is the Killer App" blog post (<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://karmaproject.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/assessment-is-the-killer-app/">http://karmaproject.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/assessment-is-the-killer-app/</a>) student assessment is an important component of Karma. <div><br> </div> <div>While toying around with the lesson UI I realized that the assessment area is still very much an empty space (which kinda reminds me of the group view in Sugar;-) as we haven't really discussed how it should look, what kind of data will be kept (which is of course heavily dependent on the type of lesson), how the data will be stored, etc. To keep the efforts required to do that in check I think that it might make sense to start by offering a handful of templates - both on the UI and storage backend side of things - to fit the most common use-cases in terms of different lesson types (e.g.inserted words into sentences, doing calculations, etc.)</div> <div><br> </div> <div>Now I was wondering whether anyone here had specific suggestions on how to address this or pointers to how other e-learning solutions (regardless of whether stand-alone applications or Web based) solve this interesting challenge.</div> <div><br> Thanks in advance,<br> Christoph</div> <div><br> -- <br> Christoph Derndorfer<br> co-editor, olpcnews<br> url: <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.olpcnews.com" target="_blank">www.olpcnews.com</a><br> e-mail: <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:christoph@olpcnews.com" target="_blank">christoph@olpcnews.com</a><br> </div> <pre wrap=""> <hr size="4" width="90%"> _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org">Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel</a> </pre> </blockquote> <br> </body> </html>